Paradigm recently announced a $20 million investment in crypto infrastructure company Ithaca, which is a startup focused on expanding R&D of open source tools like Reth and Foundry and building commercial products.
Ithaca, which was built by Paradigm’s CTO and General Partner Georgios Konstantopoulos, and fewer than 20 engineers who have helped build projects like Reth, will accelerate crypto development by contributing to and maintaining open-source projects starting with the release of Odyssey, a Layer 2 built on Reth for performance and stability (following the OP Stack standard).
Konstantopoulos, CTO at Paradigm and now also CEO of Ithaca, issued a statement on X about the project:
Crypto needs to move faster.
We started @Ithacaxyz to accelerate the frontier, & have raised $20M from @paradigm.
We’ve been collaborating with the developer community on some of crypto’s hardest problems. Small teams = big impact. The future of crypto will be built together. pic.twitter.com/tdZI543oVh
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) October 11, 2024
Ithaca will help advance the crypto industry while ensuring that great developers can continue to work on important open-source public goods within crypto. And the Ithaca team will be composed of the lead contributors and maintainers of the above open-source projects.
Georgios will continue his role as Paradigm’s CTO and General Partner and lead the Ithaca team as CEO. And Matt Huang will be joining as Chairman.
Previously, Huang was a partner at Sequoia Capital focusing on early-stage venture investments including leading the firm’s cryptocurrency efforts. And Huang was the founder and CEO of Hotspots, a Y Combinator company acquired by Twitter in 2012, and angel investor in companies such as Bytedance and Instacart. He purchased his first Bitcoin from MtGox in 2012. Matt holds a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT.
Konstantopoulos was previously an independent consultant and researcher focused on cryptography, information security and mechanism design. He earned his M.Eng. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Paradigm will continue funding and supporting open-source projects, and the Ithaca team will continue to contribute to and maintain them.
