Joining Paradigm as Research Advisor

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Paradigm part-time as a Research Advisor, working alongside Dan Robinson, Matt Huang, and the rest of the Paradigm team to support the next generation of crypto projects. I’ll be bringing perspectives from economics and game theory, with a particular emphasis on mechanism design at both the protocol and application layers.

By training, I’m an economist focused on game theory and mechanism design. Over the past fifteen years, I’ve been a professor—first at the University of Pennsylvania, then at Rice University—studying how incentives shape outcomes in markets and information systems.

My real dive into crypto began during DeFi summer in 2020. Suddenly, the concepts I’d taught in classrooms—auctions, equilibria, signaling—were being turned into code and executed by globally distributed actors. For a mechanism designer, it was irresistibly intriguing.

I started with a basic question: why don’t auctions work as well onchain as they do in traditional markets? That led to my first blockchain research paper, Censorship Resistance in On-Chain Auctions (with Elijah Fox and Max Resnick). We pointed out a fundamental tension: most blockchains rely on single-leader consensus protocols, which means that leader temporarily acts as a monopolist. Monopoly rents make life difficult for mechanism designers. Our proposed fix? Introduce multiple concurrent leaders to mitigate MEV issues at the base layer.

That research push turned into practice. I started working with Special Mechanisms Group in April 2023 (acquired by Consensys later that year), where I’ve worked on everything from researching Ethereum MEV (illuminating the dark forest) to order flow strategy, and more recently, a host of special projects. I’ll continue working at Consensys, and I see the combination of operational insights from Consensys and the broader industry perspective at Paradigm as deeply complementary and valuable to my work at both.

Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that blockchains—and the decentralized systems built atop them—will be central to the future of digital infrastructure, from financial markets to other core systems. But getting there will require both fundamental research and tight collaboration with builders. To that end, I’m excited to collaborate with Dan and Ciamac helping to better understand fundamental issues like timing incentives and centralization pressures in protocols. I’m also looking forward to working closely with portfolio companies (current and future). I’ve whetted my appetite a little thinking about prover markets for Succinct, and am excited to sink my (research) teeth into more.