Designing DeFi: Protocols & Incentives Conference

Designing DeFi: Protocols & Incentives brings together researchers in academia and industry, engineers, and practitioners working at the intersection of mechanism design and the economics of novel markets and blockchain systems.

Particularly, D² 2026 aims to foster rigorous discussion of how DeFi systems are designed, how they behave in adversarial and strategic environments, and how incentive structures shape outcomes at scale.

D² is a venue for work that asks not just what is happening in DeFi, but why systems behave the way they do - and how they should be designed differently. The agenda includes topics that:

• Advance understanding of incentives in decentralized systems, and surface design trade-offs
• Analyze production systems or live markets, or introduce new protocol primitives or market designs
• Connect theory to real protocol behavior – bridge theory, simulation, and empirical evidence.

Beyond the two-day program, we also aim to build a platform that connects the DeFi research community, sparking ongoing discussion, collaboration, and research funding opportunities. We hope this effort helps cultivate new research interests and academic talent, and foster innovations and real-world implementations that put theory into applications and products at scale. Submissions are closed, but we are considering lightning talks here.

------------------------------------------------

• Ciamac Moallemi (Columbia University, Paradigm, Uniswap Labs)
• Tarun Chitra (Robot Ventures, Gauntlet)
• Bita Abolfathi (Uniswap Labs)

• Danning Sui (Pantera Capital)
• Mallesh Pai (Tempo)
• Ruizhe Jia (Stanford University)

------------------------------------------------

DAY 1, MAY 20:

8:15 AM – 9:30 AM | Registration & Breakfast

9:30 AM – 9:50 AM | Opening Remarks

9:50 AM – 11:35 AM | DeFi Microstructure

• Brian Zhu (Columbia University) —
• Sarisht Wadhwa (Duke University) —
• Fayçal Drissi (University of Oxford) —

11:35 AM – 12:20 PM | Keynote

• Jarry Xiao (Ellipsis Labs) — Perp DEXes

12:20 PM – 1:50 PM | Lunch

1:50 PM – 3:05 PM | Perpetual Futures and Derivatives

• Zachary Feinstein (Stevens Institute of Technology) — Designing On-Chain Options: Amortizing Perpetual Options
• Natascha Hey (Columbia University) —
• Tarun Chitra (Robot Ventures, Gauntlet) —

3:35 PM – 4:50 PM | Mechanism Design

• Srivatsan Sridhar (UC Berkeley) —
• Matheus Xavier Ferreira (University of Virginia) — Credible Auctions via MPC Gadgets: Bounding Information Leakage Under Abort
• Fahad Saleh (University of Florida, CBER Forum) —

5:30 PM – 7:00 PM | Happy Hour - RSVP

DAY 2, MAY 21

8:45 AM – 9:30 AM | Breakfast

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM | Empirical Analysis

• Walter Stover (George Mason University) — Cultural Backgrounds and Depositor Behaviors in a Crypto “Bank” Run
• Jay Yu (Pantera Capital) — Paper Agents, Paper Gains: An Empirical Analysis of DeFi Investment Agents
• Joel Hasbrouck (Stern School, NYU) — Market Inefficiency in Cryptoasset Markets

11:00 AM – 11:45 AM | Keynote

• Rajiv Sethi (Barnard College, Columbia University) — Prediction Markets

11:45 AM – 12:45 PM | Lightning Talks

• Submit a talk here

12:45 PM – 2:15 PM | Lunch

2:15 PM – 3:05 PM | DeFi Microstructure 2

• Jason Milionis (Category Labs) — EVM Workloads in the Wild: Evidence for Multi-Dimensional Gas Metering, State Growth, Delayed Execution, and Parallelism
• Sen Yang (Yale University) — Geographical Centralization Resilience in Ethereum's Block-Building Paradigms

3:20 PM – 5:00 PM | AMMs

• Viraj Nadkarni (Princeton University) — Automated Market Making for Energy Sharing
• Vittorio Ruffo (Frankfurt School of Finance and Management) — Market Efficiency in Prediction Markets - A Comparison with Derivatives
• Nihar Shah (Ostium) — Hyperbolic Funding Rate Mechanisms for Open Interest Balancing in Perpetual Futures Markets
• Jeremy Clark (Concordia University) —

5:00 PM – 5:05 PM | Closing Ceremony

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Columbia Business School, David Geffen Hall, 645 West 130th Street, New York, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

Get App