It all started with a question: are we doing enough to push the boundaries of blockchain technology forward?

 

In early 2023, we welcomed a huge asset to Pantera’s team: Matt Stephenson, our resident PhD researcher. If you’ve ever spoken to Matt, you know that he probably would’ve been your favorite professor in school, but fortunately decided to pursue a career uncovering and advancing the possibilities of blockchain technology. With Matt on the team, it quickly became apparent to us that we needed to think of a creative way to leverage his expertise to foster deep, high-level research within the blockchain space. And so Pantera Catalyze was born. 

 

The truth is we had toyed with the idea of a fellowship program for some time. VC firms were already running incubator programs, but the market felt saturated, and many of these founder fellowships had a narrow focus on finding product market fit and go-to-market rather than true research. We wanted to do something different. There was a general lack of support and emphasis on the technical thinkers in the industry, and we wanted to create a space that celebrated deep research and innovative ideas without the pressure of immediate productization. Our goal was clear: focus on the researchers that were pushing new ideas forward, not just on the teams building them. 

 

At the time, only a handful of programs (like The Latest in DeFi) were exploring similar ideas, but no VCs were putting such a strong emphasis on technical research. We saw an opportunity to lead, so we outlined a curriculum, defined research goals, brought on mentors, secured speakers, partnered with data providers, and launched Pantera Catalyze.

 

The response exceeded our expectations, and we realized there was a bigger appetite for a program like this than we initially thought. All 210+ stacked applicants shared their research samples and insights on the current state of blockchain technology and passionately advocated for their place in the program. As such, our deliberation process was brutal. We conducted multiple interview rounds, facilitated meetings with team members, and performed detailed reference checks with professors and employers.

 

In the end, we selected a final cohort of 10 of the most impressive rising stars in crypto research we could find.

 

 

And so the journey began! Our 10 researchers went through an intensive five-week program where they crunched through on-chain data, uncovered valuable insights, and worked with some of the biggest names in the space. Weekly meetings led by Matt Stephenson featured guest speakers like Ed Felten and Illia Polosukhin, and 1:1 sessions allowed fellows to connect with mentors and the Pantera team. Each week, fellows presented their ideas on a new technical topic and offered feedback to one another, creating a truly collaborative learning experience. 

 

The original goal was for each fellow to produce an impactful piece of research by the program’s conclusion. What we discovered, however, was that success could take on many forms beyond that. Some fellows uncovered data, tested hypotheses, and found that their topics didn’t necessarily need to result in a formal paper—and that was perfectly fine. That’s part of the research process. One fellow, Bhargav Annem, was looking into LLM router optimization to revolutionize Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) applications by utilizing routing systems with search engine optimization (SEO) principles. He went on to be a star intern for Succinct Labs where his bls12-381 precompiles reduced the cycle count for building SP1-Helios (a ZK Ethereum light client) in SP1 from 6 billion cycles to just 50 million cycles—a 99% reduction! Another fellow, Shouqiao Wang, had his paper on Proof of Sampling become a whitepaper for Hyperbolic. We’re confident the connections our fellows made and the insights they learned through the program will continue to help them advance their careers and push forward technical research in their own endeavors.

 

And that brings us to today. We’re extremely excited to present the five research papers that made it to the finish line, along with the talented researchers behind them.

 

• Brian Zhu, Operations Research PhD student at Columbia University:
• Stablecoin Runs and Disclosure Policy in the Presence of Large Sales
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• Shouqiao Wang, Decision, Risk, and Operations Division PhD student at Columbia Business School:
• Proof of Sampling: A Nash Equilibrium-Secured Verification Protocol for Decentralized Systems
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• Anish Goel, Applied Mathematics student at CalTech:
• Multiplication is hard: A review of techniques aiming to parallelize matrix operations to accelerate crypto-ML frameworks
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• Dongryeol Lee, Finance PhD student at UCLA:
• Economics of Layer 2 Scaling: Estimating Price Elasticity of Layer 2 Gas Fees
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• William Meng, Financial Economics M.S. student at Columbia Business School:
• Analysis of Factors that Drive Ethereum Staking Deposit and Withdrawal Trends across Various Staking Participant Groups

 

We are incredibly proud of what Pantera Catalyze has accomplished with our inaugural class. The success of the Fellowship speaks to the power of collaboration and the value of investing in research. As 2024 comes to a close and crypto’s tailwinds propel us into 2025, we believe initiatives like Pantera Catalyze are key to shaping the future of blockchain. We’re excited to nurture more talent in the years to come!

 

For more information about Pantera Catalyze, please visit https://catalyze.panteracapital.com.