CV
Education
- 2019 - 2024 Ph.D. (direct track) in Computer Science, Hebrew University. Advisor: Aviv Zohar
🏆 Named one of the CBER Forum’s top PhD Graduates of 23-24
🏆 Recipient of the merit-based Ze’ev Jabotinsky 4-year fellowship (460K NIS, about 135K USD) - 2016 - 2018 MS.c. in Computer Science, Hebrew University. Advisor: Aviv Zohar
🏆 Received the rector prize for ranking first in MS.c. class - 2013 - 2016 BS.c. in Computer Science, Hebrew University
🏆 The Hebrew University’s Amirim Science excellence scholarship
Professional Experience
- 2024 - 2024 Postdoctoral Associate. Yale University. Hosts: Profs. Fan Zhang, Ben Fisch, Charalampos Papamanthou, Zhong Shao
- 2023 - 2024 Visiting Researcher. University of Innsbruck, Austria. Host: Prof. Rainer Böhme
- 2023 - 2024 Research Consultant. Matter Labs. Host: Prof. Benjamin Livshits
- 2023 - 2023 Research Associate. Matter Labs. Host: Prof. Benjamin Livshits
Papers
- GEB'25 Transaction Fee Mechanisms Robust to Welfare-Increasing Collusion
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
Accepted with Minor Revision to Games and Economic Behavior (GEB) - FC'25 Proophi: A ZKP Market Mechanism
Authors: Wenhao Wang, Lulu Zhou, Aviv Yaish, Fan Zhang, Ben Fisch, Benjamin Livshits
In: Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2025 (FC'25) Acceptance rate: 15% - 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* - MARBLE'24 Discrete & Bayesian Transaction Fee Mechanisms
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy (MARBLE'24) - WWW'24 Incentives in the Ether: Practical Cryptocurrency Economics & Security
Authors: Aviv Yaish
In: Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024 (WWW'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) A*
🏆 Awarded a Flashbots bounty
🏆 Awarded an Ethereum Foundation bounty
🏆 Ranked 63rd in MLSEC's Normalized Top-100 Security Papers list
đź“° Covered by Blockworks - WWW'24 Blockchain Censorship
Authors: Toni Wahrstatter, Jens Ernstberger, Aviv Yaish, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Taro Tsuchiya, Sebastian Steinhorst, Nicholas Cristin, Davor Svetinovic, Mikolaj Barczentewicz, Arthur Gervais
In: Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024 (WWW'24) A* - SBC'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 award - DeFi@CCS'23 The Vulnerable Nature of Decentralized Governance in DeFi
Authors: Maya Dotan, Aviv Yaish, Hsin-Chu Yin, Eytan Tsytkin, Aviv Zohar
In: Proceedings of the 2023 Workshop on Decentralized Finance and Security (DeFi@CCS'23) - CCS'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
đź“° Covered by International Business Times, CryptoSlate, Cointelegraph - IGTC'23 Greedy Transaction Fee Mechanisms for (Non-)myopic Miners
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish
In: The 12th Annual Conference of the Israeli Chapter of the Game Theory Society (IGTC'23) - AFT'23 Correct Cryptocurrency ASIC Pricing: Are Miners Overpaying?
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Aviv Zohar
In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT'23) - EC'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
Under Submission - Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Nir Chemaya, Lin William Cong, Dahlia Malkhi - Platform Building With Fake Consumers: On Double Dippers and Airdrop Farmers
Authors: Hanna Halaburda, Benjamin Livshits, Aviv Yaish - Insecurity Through Obscurity: Veiled Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source Contracts
Authors: Sen Yang, Kaihua Qin, Aviv Yaish, Fan Zhang - Towards Artificial Intelligence Research Assistant for Expert-Involved Learning
Authors: Tianyu Liu, Simeng Han, Xiao Luo, Hanchen Wang, Biqing Zhu, Rihao Qu, Yufeng Liu, Xinyue Cui, Yuge Wang, Keyi Li, Jiapeng Chen, Aviv Yaish, Yuhang Chen, Minsheng Hao, Chuhan Li, Kexing Li, Arman Cohan, Hua Xu, Mark Gerstein, Hongyu Zhao - Quantifying Inequality in Blockchain Networks
Authors: Nir Chemaya, Aviv Yaish, Shahar Yacouel, Dahlia Malkhi, Lin William Cong - Scheduling With Time Discounts
Authors: Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish - Strategic Vote Timing in Elections With Public Tallies
Authors: Aviv Yaish, Svetlana Abramova, Rainer Böhme - Airdrops: Giving Money Away is Harder than it Seems
Authors: Johnnatan Messias*, Aviv Yaish*, Benjamin Livshits (*: equal contribution)
Grants
- 2025 Columbia Business School Digital Future Initiative Grant. (PI, 30K USD)
- 2025 Ethereum Foundation Grant. (PI, 33K USD)
- 2025 Ethereum Foundation Grant. Title: A Cryptographic Cookbook for Mechanism Designers (PI, 19.8K USD)
- 2023 Ethereum Foundation Grant. Title: DoS implications of censorship (PI, 72K USD)
- 2023 Ethereum Foundation Grant. Title: Quantitative Analysis of Censorship (Co-I, 25K USD)
Honors & Awards
- 2025 Rochester Institute of Technology's Future Faculty Career Exploration Program
- 2024 Selected for the last stage of the CSAW'24 Applied Research Competition (ARC)
- 2024 The 4th Annual CBER Conference's best paper award
- 2024 ACM EC24 student travel funding
- 2023 Named one of the CBER Forum’s top PhD Graduates of 23-24
- 2023 ACM CCS23 distinguished paper award
- 2023 Flashbots company’s bounty
- 2023 Ethereum Foundation’s bounty
- 2023 Austria-Israel Academic Network Innsbruck (AIANI) fellowship
- 2023 AFT23 student travel funding
- 2023 ACM EC23 student travel funding
- 2023 ACM CCS23 travel grant
- 2023 ACM CCS23 iMentor workshop travel funding
- 2023 The Hebrew University’s Diversity Unit’s September travel grant for outstanding PhDs
- 2023 The Hebrew University’s Diversity Unit’s March travel grant for outstanding PhDs
- 2023 Devconnect academic travel grant (awarded, did not collect)
- 2022 Vaad Edat Hasfaradim’s scholarship
- 2022 The Hebrew University’s Authority for Research Students’ travel grant
- 2021 The Hebrew University’s award for excellence in teaching
- 2021 Ethereum Foundation bounty (awarded, did not collect)
- 2020 Ranked 9th out of 111 teaching staff in The Hebrew University’s CS school
- 2019 Zcash Foundation’s Zcon1 travel scholarship
- 2018 Merit-based Ze’ev Jabotinsky 4-year fellowship for direct-to-PhD students (460K NIS, about 135K USD)
- 2018 The Hebrew University’s Dean prize
- 2018 The Hebrew University’s Rector prize, for ranking first in MS.c. class
- 2016 First place at the Hebrew University’s Machine Learning hackathon
- 2013 The Hebrew University’s Amirim Science excellence scholarship
- 2007 Ranked in the 99th percentile in Israel’s SAT equivalent (psychometric exam)
Teaching
- 2017 - 2024 Lecturer. System Introduction (67100), Hebrew University
Sole lecturer and creator of a MOOC on the commandline of UNIX-esque operating systems, taught 850 students/year.
- 2017 - 2023 Lecturer. From NAND to Tetris (67925/6), Hebrew University
Sole lecturer for a course on building a computer from the ground up, managed 7 TAs and taught +500 students/year.
- 🏆 2021 Award for excellence in teaching from the Hebrew University's CS school
- 🏆 2020 Ranked 9th out of 111 teaching staff at the Hebrew University's CS school
- 2020 Teaching Assistant. Introduction to Cryptocurrencies (67513), Hebrew University
Co-created and co-taught with Prof. Aviv Zohar a graduate course on cryptocurrencies, mentored 25 student projects. - 2015 - 2020 Teaching Assistant. Metric Embedding Theory & Its Algorithmic Applications (67720), Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming (67125), Programming Workshop in C / C++ (67318/9, 67321/2)
Academic Service
Program Committees
- 2026 ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, AAAI, DeFi@FC
- 2025 ACM EC, ACM WWW, ACM DeFi@CCS, CAAW@FC, FC, TLDR, SAGT, AFT
- 2024 ACM EC, ACM WWW, ACM DeFi@CCS, MARBLE, AFT, FC
- 2023 ACM DeFi@CCS
Reviewing & Refereeing
- 2025 Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Information Systems Research
- 2024 ACM-SIAM SODA, Management Science, Transactions on Economics and Computation, Mathematics of Operations Research
- 2023 ACM CCS, ACM EC, ACM WWW, ACM-SIAM SODA, DeFi@FC, FC, WEIS
- 2022 ACM WWW, IEEE S&P
Talks
- Deconstructing and Rebuilding Trust in Modern Economies
- 2025 Invited. RIT's Future Faculty Career Exploration Program
- Forthcoming Invited. Complexity Science Hub Vienna
- Forthcoming Invited. Yale University's CS/OR/Econ Theory Lunch
- Forthcoming Invited. University of Chicago Booth School of Business
- Transaction Fee Mechanisms Robust to Welfare-Increasing Collusion
- 2025 Invited. Yale's Computer Science and Economics Day
- Transaction Fee Mechanisms: Theory & Practice
- 2024 Invited. Yale's Applied Cryptography Seminar
- 2024 Invited. Decentralised Science (DeSci) Seminar at the University of Sydney
- CrudiTEE: A Stick-and-Carrot Approach to Building Trustworthy Cryptocurrency Wallets with TEEs
- 2024 The 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT'24)
- TierDrop: Harnessing Airdrop Farmers for User Growth
- 2024 The Blockchain Lab Seminar at NYU Stern School of Business
- Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms
- 2024 Invited. The 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting (INFORMS'24)
- Discrete & Bayesian Transaction Fee Mechanisms
- 2024 The 5th International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy (MARBLE'24)
- Incentives in the Ether: Practical Cryptocurrency Economics & Security
- 2025 Invited. The Technion's Blockchain Seminar
- 2024 The ACM on Web Conference (WWW'24)
- 2024 The ACM on Web Conference Promo (WWW'24)
- 2024 The Hebrew University's Distributed Algorithms, Networking and Security seminar
- Speculative Denial-of-Service Attacks in Ethereum
- Suboptimality in DeFi
- Greedy Transaction Fee Mechanisms for (Non-)myopic Miners
- 2023 The 12th Annual Conference of the Israeli Chapter of the Game Theory Society (IGTC'23)
- 2022 The Technion's Industrial Engineering and Management Day (IEM22)
- Uncle Maker: (Time)Stamping Out The Competition
- Blockchain Stretching & Squeezing: Manipulating Time For Your Best Interest
- Correct Cryptocurrency ASIC Pricing: Are Miners Overpaying?