Speakers


  • Brad Bachu
    Uniswap Labs
    Brad is a researcher at Uniswap Labs. He holds a PhD in Physics from Princeton University and a BSc in Physics and Mathematics from MIT. His PhD research focused on high-energy theoretical physics, where he used on-shell techniques to explore the properties of relativistic scattering amplitudes. His work has been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics and Physical Review D, covering topics in particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology. Giving up on searching for the fundamental truths of nature, he now focuses on topics related to decentralized finance and trading.

  • Ben Berger
    Ben is a research scientist at Offchain Labs, working on blockchain related problems mostly from an economic perspective. Prior to that he was a Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. Michal Feldman. During that time he studied a broad range of problems at the border of Computer Science and Economics. He received his M.Sc. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2018, where he was advised by Prof. Zvika Brakerski. During his M.Sc. he worked on Complexity Theory and Cryptography. He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Technion in 2014.

  • Bruno Biais
    HEC
    Bruno Biais holds a PHD in finance from HEC, received the Paris Bourse dissertation award and the CNRS bronze medal. He taught at Toulouse, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, LSE, and now HEC. His research on finance, contract theory and experimental economics is published in Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies and Journal of Financial Economics. He was editor of the Review of Economic Studies and of the Journal of Finance. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the Finance Theory group and has been scientific adviser to the NYSE, Euronext, European Central Bank and Bank of England.

  • Benedikt Bünz
    NYU Courant
    Benedikt Bünz is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU Courant. He also cofounded and is the chief scientist of Espresso Systems. He researches applied cryptography, consensus and game theory, especially as it relates to cryptocurrencies. His work focuses on enhancing the privacy, usability and security of blockchain protocols.

  • Agostino Capponi
    Columbia University
    Agostino Capponi is a professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University, where he is also the director of the Center for Digital Finance and Technologies, and a member of the Data Science Institute. Agostino's research interests are in market microstructure, financial technology, economic networks, and machine learning in finance. Agostino's research has been published in major journals of his field, including Management Science, Operations Research, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Monetary Economics, Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Mathematical Finance. Agostino is co-editor of the book Machine Learning and Data Sciences in Financial Markets, published by the Cambridge University Press. Agostino is a fellow of the Crypto and Blockchain Economic Research Forum, an academic fellow of the Luohoan Academy established by the Alibaba Group, and external research fellow at the Fintech@Cornell Center. Agostino's research has been funded by major public agencies including the NSF, DARPA, U.S. Department of Energy, and private agencies and corporations including J.P. Morgan, IBM, Ripple, the Ethereum Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Global Risk Institute, the Clearpool Group, and the OCP Group.

  • Amit Chaudhary
    Labyrinth
    Amit is the founder of Labyrinth, a modular framework to preserve privacy in public blockchains and simultaneously provide decentralized compliance network. He is also an honorary research fellow at Gillmore Centre for Financial Technology at University of Warwick. He was the Head of DeFi Research at Polygon. At Polygon, he also led the R&D and incubation of innovative blockchain primitives and co-authored the whitepaper of Polygon 2.0. He has authored multiple papers on the topics of zero knowledge proofs, privacy, novel design and risk assessment of DeFi protocols and crypto economics. He is an active advisor and speaker in the blockchain community, and has served as a technical advisor for several blockchain startups. He has worked in quantitative roles in traditional finance firms like JPMorgan Chase and ICICI bank. He started his career as a computational fluid dynamics engineer at Ansys. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Warwick, an MA in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and a Bachelor of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

  • Lin Cong
    Cornell University
    Lin William Cong is the Rudd Family Professor of Management (endowed faculty chair by the Rudd Family Foundation) and a Tenured Professor of Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University SC Johnson College of Business. He is also the founding faculty director for the FinTech Initiative at Cornell, a faculty scientist at the Initiatives for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Cornell, he was an assistant professor of Finance and Ph.D. advisor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and faculty member at the Center for East Asian Studies. He is formerly a Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellow, a Poets & Quants World Best Business School Professor, a 2022 Top Quant Professor, a doctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, and the George Shultz Scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Cong has served as a Finance Editor for the Management Science, and as associate or advisory editors for the Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Portfolio Management, Journal of Corporate Finance, and the Journal of Banking and Finance, among other editorial roles. He is also a member of multiple professional organizations such as the American Economic Association, European Finance Association, and the Econometric Society.

  • George Deodatis
    Columbia University
    Professor George Deodatis received his Diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece in 1982. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from Columbia University (received in 1984 and 1987 respectively). He started his academic career at Princeton University where he served as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor (with tenure). He moved to Columbia University in 2002 where he served as Associate Professor and Professor. He currently holds the Santiago and Robertina Calatrava Family Endowed Chair at the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University. He served as Department Chair from 2013 to 2019 (two terms). His research interests are in the area of probabilistic methods in civil engineering and engineering mechanics, with emphasis on risk analysis and risk management of the civil infrastructure subjected to natural and man-made hazards (including earthquakes, floods, and climate change). He has received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability Junior Research Prize, and the American Society of Civil Engineers Walter Huber Research Prize. He is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE's highest honor) and a Fellow of the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. In 2009, he was elected President of the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability for a four-year term. In 2017, he was elected President of the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers for a two-year term. While on the faculty at Princeton University, he was awarded the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching, Princeton's highest teaching honor. At Columbia University, he has received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, Columbia's highest teaching honors.

  • Fayçal Drissi
    University of Oxford
    Fayçal is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford-Man Institute, University of Oxford. He obtained a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2023, where his thesis focused on algorithmic trading problems in traditional electronic markets and in decentralised trading platforms that use Automated Market Makers (AMMs). Prior to his doctoral studies, he spent five years in the hedge fund industry, engaging in research and development related to derivatives pricing and systematic trading.

  • Brett Falk
    University of Pennsylvania
    Dr. Falk is a research professor in the department computer and information sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the director of the Crypto and Society Lab, which focuses on 1) privacy and security in digital environments, 2) facilitating transparency and trust. He has published extensively in the field of cryptography, coding theory and network analysis. Dr. Falk also teaches a highly popular course on Blockchain technology for Penn's Master's in Computing and Information Technology program. He received his Sc.B. in mathematics from Brown University, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA.

  • Ed Felten
    Offchain Labs and Princeton University
    Ed's research interests include computer security and privacy, and public policy issues relating to information technology. Specific topics include software security, Internet security, electronic voting, cybersecurity policy, technology for government transparency, network neutrality and Internet policy. He is the Director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), a cross-disciplinary effort studying digital technologies in public life. CITP has seventeen affiliated faculty members and maintains a diverse research program and a busy events schedule.

  • Hanna Halaburda
    NYU Stern
    Hanna explores how technology is changing economic forces. She focuses on blockchain technologies and platform competition. In both these areas, we see that technology has challenged the underlying foundations of business, and firms must evaluate and change their strategies accordingly. Her findings indicate that conventional wisdom and rules of thumb derived from standard economic analysis may provide insufficient guidance to firms in technology-focused industries.

  • Campbell Harvey
    Duke University
    Campbell R. Harvey is Professor of Finance at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served as President of the American Finance Association in 2016. Professor Harvey obtained his doctorate at the University of Chicago in business finance. He has served on the faculties of the Stockholm School of Economics, the Helsinki School of Economics, and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He is a Fellow of the American Finance Association. Over the past eight years, Professor Harvey has taught Innovation and Cryptoventures at Duke University. The course focuses on decentralized finance and web3 technology. He also teaches an elective focused on advanced investment topics, Global Asset Allocation. His book, DeFi and the Future of Finance was published by John Wiley and Sons in the fall of 2021. He also offers four-course DeFi specialization on Coursera that has attracted over 100,000 students.

  • Joel Hasbrouck
    NYU Stern
    Joel's primary area of research is market microstructure (the analysis, design and regulation of trading mechanisms for securities). In addition to teaching at Stern, his present affiliations include Advisory Editor of the Journal of Financial Markets; Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Econometrics; Fellow of the Society of Financial Econometrics; Fellow of the Columbia Law School Program in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Chemistry from Haverford College. He has served as a consultant, instructor, and/or advisor board member for numerous public and private institutions, sometimes for compensation (and sometimes pro bono).

  • Michael Lee
    Federal Reserve Bank of New York
    Michael's research interests are broadly in financial intermediation, financial markets, and corporate finance. His recent work explores the intersection of technology and finance. Relevant topics include digital assets, the design and safeguarding of financial and information networks, the economics and regulation of data, and financial market design.

  • Alfred Lehar
    University of Calgary
    Alfred is professor in the finance area. He has been teaching at the Haskayne School of Business since 2005. He received an undergraduate degree and a PhD from the University of Vienna. Prior to Joining Haskayne, Alfred held positions at the University of Vienna and the University of British Columbia. Alfred teaches a introductory finance for the MBAs and a class on Corporate Finance for PhD students. Alfred's areas of research interest include fintech, bank regulation, financial stability, and corporate finance. Alfred is currently researching mining fees and price differentials in Bitcoin markets, decentralized exchanges, and under what conditions renegotiations can facilitate a private sector workout of a financial crisis.

  • Jiasun Li
    George Mason University
    Dr. Li received Ph.D. in finance from UCLA Anderson School of Management and B.S. in mathematics from Fudan University (Shanghai, China) prior to joining George Mason. His current research interest is at the intersection of economics and computer science, including blockchain technologies and FinTech applications. His research papers analyze node incentives in distributed consensus protocols, crypto tokens' roles in jumpstarting platforms, the industrial organization of cryptocurrency mining pools with implications for blockchain (de-)centralization and energy consumption, factor structures in cryptocurrency returns, manipulations on crypto exchanges, crypto derivatives, cross-chain communication and interoperability, incentive issues in blockchain scaling solutions, reliability of blockchain explorers, fundamental demand for cryptocurrencies, Web3 participant profiles, and the security design of investment crowdfunding for both investors and entrepreneurs to harness "wisdom of the crowd".

  • Julian Ma
    Ethereum Foundation
    Julian is a researcher at the Robust Incentives Group of the Ethereum Foundation.

  • Katya Malinova
    McMaster University
    Katya Malinova is an Associate Professor and holds the Mackenzie Investments Chair in Evidence-Based Investment Management at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University. Prior to joining DeGroote in July 2018, Katya was an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on equity market structure and FinTech. She holds grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and her research has been published in top journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, Management Scicence, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Katya collaborated with the Canadian regulators on research, and she currently serves on the OSC Market Structure Advisory Committee. She is an Editor of the Journal of Financial Technology and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Markets and the Financial Management. She has taught courses in investments, corporate finance, and FinTech.

  • Robert McLaughlin
    UC Santa Barbara
    Robert is a PhD Candidate at UC Santa Barbara. He studies smart contract security and decentralized finance. He is advised by Giovanni Vigna and Christopher Kruegel.

  • Ciamac Moallemi
    Columbia University
    Ciamac C. Moallemi is the William von Mueffling Professor of Business in the Decision, Risk, and Operations Division of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, where he has been since 2007. He also develops quantitative trading strategies at Bourbaki LLC, a quantitative investment advisor. A high school dropout, he received S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1996). He studied at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a Master of Advanced Study degree in Mathematics (Part III of the Mathematical Tripos), with distinction (1997). He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (2007). Prior to his doctoral studies, he developed quantitative methods in a number of entrepreneurial ventures, as a partner in a $200 million fixed-income arbitrage hedge fund and as the director of scientific computing at an early-stage drug discovery start-up. He holds editorial positions at the journals Operations Research and Management Science. He is a past recipient of the British Marshall Scholarship (1996), the Benchmark Stanford Graduate Fellowship (2003), first place in the INFORMS Junior Faculty Paper Competition (2011), and the Best Simulation Publication Award of the INFORMS Simulation Society (2014). His research interests are in the area of the optimization and control of large-scale stochastic systems and decision-making under uncertainty, with an emphasis on applications in financial engineering.

  • Alex Nezlobin
    London School of Economics
    Alex is a Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics. Prior to LSE, he got his PhD in Business from Stanford University and worked as a professor at the business schools of UC Berkeley and New York University. He holds a CPA license in the State of California but rarely if ever uses it.

  • Brian Nistler
    Uniswap Foundation
    Brian is an in-house counsel focused on digital asset trading platforms.

  • Mallesh Pai
    Associate Professor at Rice University and Researcher at Special Mechanisms Group, Consensys
    Mallesh M Pai is the Lay Family Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Rice University, and a CEPR Research Fellow. He is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies (learn more about the wonderful majors the Department of Economics offers here). His research interests include mechanism design/ auction theory, and their applications to the design of blockchains and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. He has also worked on the economics of privacy, social networks/ social learning and statistical decision theory. Prior to joining Rice, Mallesh was a Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor of the Social Sciences at the Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania. He has a PhD in Managerial Economics and Strategy from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

  • Brett Palatiello
    Eigen Labs
    Brett is the Head of Economic Research at Eigen Labs. Previously, he ran a multi-strategy crypto/web3 fund as a Partner, Head of Blockchain at Interplay. Prior to that, he was a partner and portfolio manager at some systematic hedge funds running market-neutral long/short equity, statistical arbitrage and global macro strategies, where also built out the entire research and production infrastructure. He is a graduate of Columbia Business School and Quinnipiac University.

  • Troy Paredes
    Paredes Strategies LLC
    Troy A. Paredes is the founder of Paredes Strategies LLC. From 2008-2013, Paredes was a Commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, having been appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Paredes served as an SEC Commissioner during an especially historic time at the SEC and for our economy, namely, throughout the financial crisis and its aftermath, including the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act. He played a key role in rulemakings and other regulatory matters concerning all aspects of the SEC's mission and securities regulation, including, among other things, antifraud and anticorruption, public company disclosures, capital formation, corporate governance, executive compensation, investment management, investment advisors, broker-dealers, exchanges, credit rating agencies, equity market structure, fixed income markets, derivatives, auditing and accounting, and cybersecurity.

  • Andreas Park
    University of Toronto
    Andreas is a Professor of Finance at the University of Toronto. He started his career at UofT in 2003 at the Economics Department, and since July 2015, he is with the Department of Management at UTM and the Rotman School of Management. Andreas is also currently serving as the Research Director at the FinHub, the Rotman School's Financial Innovation lab. He spent the 2014-2015 academic year in Wonderful Copenhagen as a Visiting Professor of Finance at Copenhagen Business School. His research is in financial market structure and, more recently, in FinTech. Andreas is working to gain a better understanding how technological innovations such as blockchain technology or high-frequency algorithmic trading affect financial markets. His research is both theoretical and empirical.

  • Tim Roughgarden
    Columbia University and a16z crypto
    Tim Roughgarden is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University and the Founding Head of Research at a16z crypto. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent 15 years on the computer science faculty at Stanford, following a PhD at Cornell and a postdoc at UC Berkeley. He works on the boundary of computer science and economics, and on the design, analysis, applications, and limitations of algorithms.

  • Fahad Saleh
    University of Florida
    Professor Saleh is a leading expert on economic design of blockchains. His work informs both the design of blockchain protocols (e.g., proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, etc…) and also the design of blockchain business applications (e.g., decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending protocols, supply chain applications, etc…). His work has been published by the top peer-reviewed scholarly journals including Management Science, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics. Additionally, he is among the most widely cited blockchain researchers in the world today, and his work includes the most widely cited scholarly article on the economic design of the proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. Professor Saleh serves on the editorial boards of Management Science and the World Scientific Annual Review of FinTech. He is also a founding member and co-organizer of the Crypto and Blockchain Economic Research (CBER) Forum and a Fellow of the FinTech Initiative at Cornell University. He holds a PhD in Finance from New York University's Stern School of Business, a Master of Science in Engineering from Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Cornell University. He is currently a member of the Finance faculty at the University of Florida and also teaches a Cryptofinance course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  • Lee Schneider
    Ava Labs
    Lee A. Schneider is a financial services and technology lawyer with extensive experience in blockchain. Lee co-hosts the Appetite for Disruption podcast with Troy Paredes and is the contributing editor for the Chambers and Partners Fintech Practice Guide. He co-founded Owl Explains and is active with a number of other organizations. Lee serves as General Counsel for Ava Labs.

  • Fabian Schär
    University of Basel
    Fabian Schär is Professor for Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain) and Fintech at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Basel. In addition, he is the Managing Director of the University's Center for Innovative Finance. He has a PhD in Cryptoassets and Blockchain economics, co-authored the bestselling book “Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptoassets”, published by MIT Press and several publications in scientific journals. His research is at the intersection of economics and computer science, with a particular focus on public Blockchains, Cryptoassets and Decentralized Finance protocols.

  • Karthik Srinivasan
    Sorella Labs
    Karthik Srinivasan is the Co-Founder and CTO of Sorella Labs. He previously worked at Citadel, and attended the University of Chicago.

  • Danning Sui
    Flashbots
    Danning is a Data Scientist at Flashbots.

  • Katrin Tinn
    McGill University
    Katrin Tinn's research focuses on theoretical modelling, technological innovation, financial economics, information economics. Her most recent work is on FinTech, the role of crowdfunding and distributed ledger technologies (blockchain) in raising external capital and facilitating learning about future demand, and on central bank digital currency design. Her research has been published in prominent journals, such as the American Economic Review, Management Science and Journal of Economic Theory. She has also written book chapters for editions focused on alternative finance, blockchain, and digital currencies (Palgrave-MacMillan, World Scientific Publishers, and VoxEU's e-book series). Prior joining McGill in 2019, she worked as an Assistant Professor of Finance at Imperial College Business School, London, and has been a member of the Centre for Global Finance and Technology, and the Imperial College multidisciplinary Fintech Network. She is a member of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). In addition to academic positions, she has also worked in commercial banking and asset management, at the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Katrin holds a MSc in Economics from University College London and a PhD in Economics from London School of Economics.

  • Fan Zhang
    Yale University
    Fan's research solves security and privacy problems in distributed and decentralized systems. In particular, he is interested in designing novel solutions leveraging Internet-scale consensus (aka blockchains), cryptography, game theory, and even trusted execution environments (TEEs). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, advised by Prof. Ari Juels. He received his bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University. He is also affiliated with Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC) and Center for Algorithms, Data, and Market Design at Yale (CADMY).