Principal Economist, Protocol Economics

Edge & Node is a creative software development company working to build a vibrant, decentralized future. Founded by the initial team behind The Graph, Edge & Node is dedicated to the advancement of web3, a decentralized and fair internet where public data is available to all—an internet that enables its users to increase agency over their creations and their lives.

Edge & Node’s initial product is The Graph, an indexing protocol for querying networks like Ethereum and IPFS, which ensures open data is always available and easy to access. The Graph is used by thousands of protocols and dapps including Uniswap, Livepeer, Aave, Decentraland, and more. Edge & Node also launched Everest, a decentralized registry with the mission to catalyze the shift to web3, facilitating community-driven curation of projects providing ongoing utility to the crypto space.

The Research & Protocol group at Edge&Node drives fundamental improvements to The Graph protocol by designing new capabilities and solving novel research challenges. We collaborate with developers and the product team to turn our ideas into productized solutions.

We are looking for a Principal Economist to work within the Protocol Economics arm of the Research & Protocol group. The selected candidate will collaborate with optimization researchers, simulation experts, developers, and other engineers as part of a cross-organizational team, partnering with other core dev teams in The Graph ecosystem, to design and evaluate cryptoeconomic mechanisms to be applied in the protocol.

Key Responsibilities

• Constructing game theoretic models of existing and proposed mechanisms
• Identifying invariants and objective functions that align with protocol goals, and designing new mechanisms that are optimal under the proposed criteria
• Identifying incentive gaps or possible vulnerabilities in The Graph's economic design
• Performing General Equilibrium Analyses of the protocol to surface how The Graph's various mechanisms might interact at the system-level
• Maintaining and publishing papers describing The Graph's protocol economics
• Applying deep knowledge of the economic literature to surface analogous settings to problems that The Graph is aiming to address
• Designing incentives for key features on The Graph's roadmap, including warp sync, a data availability committee, and market design for streaming data interfaces
• Collaborating with optimization researchers, machine learning researchers, UX researchers, product management, and company leadership to produce original work that meets the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders

Desired Skills & Qualifications

• PhD in Economics, Mechanism Design, Algorithmic Game Theory, Operations Research, or related field.
• Experience working in industry or in another applied setting, with experience working within multidisciplinary teams, taking research ideas to production.
• A passion for teaching others and exceptional verbal and written communication skills.
• Experience working on cross-discipline projects, across economics, computer science, and mathematics.
• Proficiency with computational methods such as numerical analysis, agent-based modeling, and other forms of simulation.
• Proven track record of publishing original work based on novel research or applications, not just describing past work.
• Adept at writing LaTeX and computational notebooks in languages such as Julia or Python.
• Strong curiosity and passion for the crypto-specific topics such as automated market makers (AMMs), maximal extractable value (MEV), and consensus.
• Broad knowledge of economic topics, including contract theory, negotiation protocols, microeconomics, macroeconomics, institutional economics, monetary theory, urban economics, and market design.
• Self-directed, proactive, self-starter who is comfortable with the autonomy of working in a remote setting.
• Proven track record of producing solutions for complex problems in a dynamic environment, against requirements, under time constraints.

About the Graph

The Graph is the source of data and information for the decentralized internet. As the original decentralized data marketplace that introduced and standardized subgraphs, The Graph has become web3’s method of indexing and accessing blockchain data. Since its launch in 2018, tens of thousands of developers have built subgraphs for dapps across 40+ blockchains - including  Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Celo, Fantom, Gnosis, and Avalanche.

As demand for data in web3 continues to grow, The Graph enters a New Era with a more expansive vision including new data services and query languages, ensuring the decentralized protocol can serve any use case - now and into the future.

Discover more about how The Graph is shaping the future of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and stay connected with the community. Follow The Graph on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Medium. Join the community on The Graph’s Telegram, join technical discussions on The Graph’s Discord.

The Graph Foundation oversees The Graph Network. The Graph Foundation is overseen by the Technical Council. Edge & Node, StreamingFast, Semiotic Labs, The Guild, Messari, GraphOps, Pinax and Geo are eight of the many organizations within The Graph ecosystem.