Paradigm Execs Unveil Web3 Development Firm Ithica and Ethereum L2

Paradigm’s chief technology officer and co-founder have launched a new project building web3 infrastructure.

On Oct. 11, Georgios Konstantopoulos, the CTO and general partner of Paradigm, a prominent digital asset venture capital firm, unveiled Ithica, a new company working with crypto builders to accelerate open-source development in web3.

Konstantopoulos noted that Ithica has raised $20 million from Paradigm. Matt Huang, the co-founder of Paradigm, will also act as chairman for Ithica.

“Over the past four years, our team shipped some of the industry’s most used open-source tools like Reth & Foundry,” Konstantopoulos said. “Ithaca is built by the same people that brought you some of the most used open source tools in crypto… We think the stack is ready, and it’s now time to accelerate.”

Ithaca Odyssey

Ithaca’s first venture is Odyssey, an open-source Layer 2 network leveraging Reth, an Ethereum consensus layer developed by Paradigm, OP Stack, Optimism’s L2 infrastructure, and Conduit, a rollup deployment service which Paradigm led the seed round of in 2023.

Odyssey aims to facilitate high-performance throughput and frictionless onboarding, and supports Ethereum Improvement Proposals set for inclusion in the network’s upcoming Pectra hard fork — including smart accounts and upgrades to the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Odyssey is currently live on Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet.

Looking ahead, Ithaca aims to advance development on interoperability, privacy, the incorporation of zero-knowledge technology in Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem, the market architecture surrounding MEV extraction, and the roadmap for Optimism’s OP Stack.

Optimism’s OP token is up 5% over the past seven days amid the news, ranking as the 24th strongest-performing digital asset among the top 100 by market cap, according to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds.

Konstantopoulos said his work on Ithica will not impact his roles as CTO and general partner at Paradigm, stating that he will continue to make investments in web3 projects and work with the company’s existing portfolio.

Paradigm is one of the largest web3 venture capital firms. The company’s portfolio includes Coinbase, the top U.S.-based crypto exchange, Uniswap, the pioneering decentralized exchange protocol, Optimism, the Ethereum Layer 2 development team, and Lido, the largest liquid staking protocol.