Bio. I like breaking things: pushing systems to their limits and understanding how they fail is fundamental to making them more robust. This drives my research into the economics and security of distributed systems.
Do get in touch if you want to collaborate or chat. This includes undergrads looking for cool projects!
News.
20 Feb 2026.Transaction Fee Mechanisms Robust to Welfare-Increasing Collusion was accepted to Games and Economic Behavior!15 Jan 2026.I'll present Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity and Platform Building With Fake Consumers at DeFi@FC26!07 Nov 2025.Excited that Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity was accepted to AAAI26.21 Apr 2025.Check out our new work, Insecurity Through Obscurity: Veiled Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source Contracts.27 Jan 2025.Varun Madathil and I are running Yale's Applied Crypto seminar, you're invited.06 Apr 2024.Hao Chung, Matheus VX Ferreira, Yotam Gafni & I will give a tutorial on transaction fee mechanisms at EC'24.29 Sep 2023.Invited to speak at YoungEC '24, do reach it out if you're there.
Selected Papers.
AAAI'26 Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Nir Chemaya, Lin William Cong, Dahlia Malkhi
In: Proceedings of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'26)EC'24 Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'24)USENIXSEC'24 Speculative Denial-of-Service Attacks in Ethereum
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Aviv Zohar, Arthur Gervais
In: Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIXSEC'24)
🏆 Awarded a Flashbots bounty
🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty
🏆 Ranked 63rd in MLSEC's Normalized Top-100 Security Papers list
📰 Covered by BlockworksCBER'24 Suboptimality in DeFi
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Maya Dotan, Kaihua Qin, Aviv Zohar, Arthur Gervais
In: The 4th Annual Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research Conference (CBER'24)
🏆 Received the 4th Annual Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research (CBER) Conference's Best Paper AwardCCS'23 Uncle Maker: (Time)Stamping Out The Competition
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Gilad Stern, Aviv Zohar
In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'23)
🏆 Received the ACM CCS 2023 Distinguished Paper Award
📰 Covered by International Business Times, CryptoSlate, CointelegraphEC'22 Blockchain Stretching & Squeezing: Manipulating Time For Your Best Interest
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Saar Tochner, Aviv Zohar
In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'22)
🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty