Joining Paradigm as Research Advisor

I'm excited to announce that I've joined Paradigm as a Research Advisor. I am excited to be working with Dan Robinson, Matt Huang, and the rest of the Paradigm investing and research teams to advise the next generation of crypto startups. I'll be focusing on applied research in mechanism and market design, with a particular focus on decentralized finance.

My academic background and training is as an engineer and applied mathematician, working in the area of dynamic programming and stochastic control -- problems where decisions are made sequentially, over time. As a professor at Columbia Business School since 2007, where I am the director of the Briger Family Digital Finance Lab, the primary applications I've thought about are in quantitative finance. This has dovetailed with my experience as a quantitative trader, from trading bonds and interest rate derivatives as a partner in a hedge fund while an MIT undergrad, to more recently developing stat arb strategies for trading stocks.

My journey into crypto started in 2016, when I started thinking about the novel economics of the Bitcoin transaction fee mechanism. This resulted in one of the first economic analyses of Bitcoin, which highlighted both its benefits -- freedom from the monopoly pricing of traditional payment systems -- and its flaws -- the necessity of significant congestion in order to generate transaction fee revenue.

Since DeFi summer, I have become interested in understanding the mechanisms for decentralized trading, in particular automated market makers such as Uniswap. With my collaborators, we identified and quantified the main mechanism of adverse selection for AMM liquidity providers, loss-versus-rebalancing (LVR), which captures how much AMM LPs lose to DEX-CEX arbitrage, and determined how it is affected by fees, block time, and volatility. The LVR paper has captured the attention of practitioners to become an important paradigm for AMM design, and many protocols have been proposed to mitigate the losses from LVR.

Beyond AMMs, I am excited about the potential for blockchains to enable incredible innovation in market structure, as compared to TradFi markets such as the US equity market, which fundamentally has the same structure now as it did 20 years ago. The world of blockchain and smart contracts, on the other hand, with its culture of rapid experimentation and open-source R&D, has spurred tremendous innovation in market mechanisms.

For me, Paradigm is the ideal place to help contribute to this revolution. As a research-driven investing firm, they blend a principled, inventive culture with a practical focus on useful applications, have attracted some of the best engineering talent in the space, and work closely with innovative founders working on the research frontier. Paradigm and their portfolio companies have been at the forefront of some of the biggest innovations in crypto and DeFi to date. I am excited to work alongside them to help solve the most challenging problems in the industry.