Today, we're announcing the creation of crypto research 💥
Research labs like DeepMind and OpenAI have elevated the field of AI to new heights.
We are setting out to do the same for crypto and web3 👇
Conversation
There is no better person in the world to lead this effort than . Over the past 20 years as a CS professor at Stanford and Columbia, Tim has pioneered the field of Algorithmic Game Theory which, along with cryptography, is of the most relevant fields for the space
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Naturally, Tim has taken a deep interest in web3 in recent years :) The YouTube lectures for his crypto and blockchain course at Columbia, for example, have become one of the best and most popular introductions to the space:
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After chatting with and others in the community, Tim also published the first formal analysis of EIP-1559, which proposed to improve how fees work on Ethereum. The report helped the community get comfortable with the proposal: timroughgarden.org/papers/eip1559
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Beyond Tim, we are also excited to welcome our founding team of Research Partners— , , , and . Each one of them is a leader in their field and has made critical contributions to the space. See the blogpost for links to their work!
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And finally, we are promoting to Senior Research Advisor. Dan is a CS professor at Stanford and is one of the most distinguished cryptographers in the world. His work (including VDFs and BLS signatures) has already been widely adopted in the space.
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Dan will continue spending time with our portfolio and will help us set the initial direction for the team.
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Our north star will be to bridge the worlds of theory with practice to help shape crypto and web3 as a formal area of study.
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To that end, the research team will be deeply integrated with our protocol design & engineering team under ; our regulatory team under and ; and our marketing and editorial teams under and .
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Working alongside the companies in our portfolio, we will: (1) come up with solutions to open problems; (2) write production-grade code to bring them to life; (3) make sure our ideas/code are compliant with regulations; and (4) share our findings with the broader web3 community.
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We're excited to dig in with our founders and others working on hard problems. Want to join us? Shoot us a note at crypto-jobs@a16z.com. And, to follow the work of this team, subscribe to our newsletter: a16zcrypto.substack.com/p/coming-soon?
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Tim's thread here!
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1/ I'm excited to announce that I've joined @a16z crypto as Head of Research! a16z.com/2022/04/21/ann
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