Financial systems are increasingly decentralized, demanding a practical fusion of systems security and economic theory. A key enabler of this change, blockchain technology, promises more open economic mechanisms, built by facilitating consensus between pseudonymous actors. However, the theoretical security of these systems may mask significant real-world risks that arise due to actor incentives. In this talk, I present my contributions to bridging this gap between theory and practice. I start with the resolution of a decade-old puzzle: the lack of observed attacks on major consensus protocols. Then, I present an incentives-aware approach to decentralized systems, and demonstrate its adoption in practice through three lines of work on: (1) collusion-resistant auctions, (2) denial-of-service resilience in transaction processing, and (3) Sybil-proof market mechanisms. I conclude with an agenda for robust and trustworthy decentralized economies.
Bio: Aviv Yaish is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, where he makes and breaks distributed systems by bridging economic theory and practical systems security. His approach is driven by a philosophy of constructive deconstruction: pushing systems to their limits is key to making them robust. His contributions have been recognized by several communities: security (CCS Distinguished Paper), economics (Annual CBER Best Paper), and industry (bounties from the Ethereum Foundation and Flashbots). He is currently a member of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3), and is a junior external faculty at Vienna's Complexity Science Hub. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University, where he served as the sole lecturer for two courses and received a teaching excellence award. During his studies, he was also a research consultant at Matter Labs. His honors include the AIANI and Jabotinsky fellowships, and inclusion in CBER's Rising Stars and the Hebrew University's 40 Under 40 lists.