Bio. I like breaking things: pushing systems to their limits and understanding how they fail is fundamental to making them more robust, secure, and economically sound. This drives my research into the economics and security of distributed systems. I am currently a postdoc at Yale, where I am grateful for being hosted by Fan Zhang, and co-hosted by Ben Fisch, Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou, and Zhong Shao. I am also a member of Yale's Applied Crypto Lab (YACL) and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3). Previously, I had the pleasure of doing a PhD with Aviv Zohar at HUJI, and was a visiting researcher at Innsbruck University, graciously hosted by Rainer Böhme. During my studies, I was the sole lecturer of two large-scale courses. I am thankful for the recognition I received. Among other honors, I was named one of the CBER Forum's Rising Stars of '25, HUJI's Top 40 Under 40 Leaders of '25, the CBER Forum's Top PhD Graduates of 2023-2024, and one of the top 10 teaching staff (out of 111) in HUJI's '21 teaching survey. Moreover, I received the CCS Distinguished Paper award, the CBER Best Paper award, HUJI's annual teaching award, the AIANI and Ze'ev Jabotinsky fellowships, and HUJI's rector award for first-in-class MSc students.
Do get in touch if you want to collaborate or chat. This includes undergrads looking for cool projects!
I am on the '25-'26 faculty job market, do reach out!
News.
28 Oct 2025.Honored to have been named one of HUJI's 40 Under 40 Young Leaders and CBER Forum's Rising Stars of '25.25 Jul 2025.Pleased to announce a new paper, Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity!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.23 May 2024.Honored to have won the 4th Annual CBER Conference's best paper award for Suboptimality in DeFi!06 Apr 2024.Hao Chung, Matheus VX Ferreira, Yotam Gafni & I will give a tutorial on transaction fee mechanisms at EC'24.20 Feb 2024.Invited to the 2024 Workshop on Algorithms for Learning and Economics (WALE).01 Dec 2023.Received the ACM CCS Distinguished Paper award for my paper Uncle Maker.29 Sep 2023.Invited to speak at YoungEC '24, do reach it out if you're there.01 Feb 2023.Honored to receive an AIANI fellowship.
Selected Papers.
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) A*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) A*
🏆 Awarded a Flashbots bounty
🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty
🏆 Ranked 63rd in MLSEC's Normalized Top-100 Security Papers list
📰 Covered by BlockworksSBC'24 Suboptimality in DeFi
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Maya Dotan, Kaihua Qin, Aviv Zohar, Arthur Gervais
In: The Science of Blockchain Conference 2024 (SBC'24) Acceptance rate: 14%
🏆 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) A*
🏆 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) A*
🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty