Research
My research spans three interconnected directions in cryptography, distributed systems, and blockchain economics. Prior and earlier work follows below.
My research builds the cryptographic and game-theoretic foundations that make decentralized protocols trustworthy at scale. I work across three directions: (1) proof systems — constructing efficient, updatable SNARKs and lookup arguments for verifiable computation over evolving data; (2) cryptographic coordination protocols — designing bias-resistant, incentive-aware randomness and leader-election protocols secure against strategic manipulation; and (3) blockchain mechanism design — analyzing and repairing transaction ordering and fee mechanisms for modern architectures including DAG consensus, sharded execution, and parallel transaction processing. My work appears at PODC, CCS, IJCAI, OOPSLA, ICBC, and IEEE Blockchain. I am a PhD student at HKUST, supported by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship (HKPFS), and a former visiting scholar at the University of Oxford.
Current
The core challenge is achieving succinct verification while supporting rich query structure and practical update patterns. My work uses updatable lookup arguments and related proof components to bridge theory-heavy ZK ideas with real systems. The Rogue paper (CCS 2026) advances updatable matrix lookup arguments and connects directly to verifiable database applications, pointing toward a broader framework for dynamic SNARKs over evolving state in rollups and verifiable infrastructure.
Context
This is the technical core of my research agenda. It points toward cryptographic interfaces that let users trust results from outsourced computation and data services without trusting the provider, a primitive that becomes more important as compute and storage move off-chain.
Core ideas
ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security · 2026
To appear.
Rogue develops updatable matrix lookup arguments and studies how they can be used to support verifiable database applications, with an emphasis on proof-system expressiveness and efficient update handling.
2022–present
A recurring question in decentralized systems is how to achieve coordination guarantees when every participant is rational and no central authority can be trusted. My work addresses this at the cryptographic and game-theoretic level: from verifiable random functions and secret random number generation to voting-based consensus protocols and smart-contract protocols that implement richer solution concepts without a trusted mediator. The unifying concern is robustness — bias resistance, incentive compatibility, and fairness — across adversarial and strategic settings. This is also where I study the strategic behavior of validators and miners in proof-of-stake systems, asking when rational participants deviate and how protocol design can close those gaps.
Context
This direction connects cryptography, distributed systems, and economics. The goal is not just secure randomness sampling, but coordination mechanisms that remain robust when participants are strategic and incentives diverge from protocol intent.
Core ideas
IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures · 2026
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
We present Proof-of-Election, a new blockchain consensus protocol that mimics real-world democratic elections, to vote based on block contents rather than blindly trust proposers, and only admit the highest voted block in each slot.
IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive · 2025
IACR ePrint 2025/1428.
This manuscript studies strategic mining in proof-of-stake systems when random beacon output is fixed across multiple future slots within an epoch. It formalizes the lookahead effect created by practical random election and gives an efficient optimal attack algorithm showing profitable deviations at much lower stake fractions than earlier per-slot-randomness models.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2024
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
SRNG presents an efficient decentralized approach to secret random number generation, aiming to provide tamper-resistant randomness while preserving the privacy properties needed by higher-level blockchain protocols.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2024
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This paper develops decentralized random beacon protocols with explicit attention to gas efficiency, aiming to keep randomness services practical for on-chain use without weakening decentralization goals.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
In randomness generation smart contracts, participants are assumed but have no incentive to submit random integers rather than sending arbitrary values. This paper presents a novel matrix game to enforce uniformity of batched value generation by collision-resistant Nash equilibria.
Workshop on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
PoS requires decentralized randomness. Existing randomness generation protocols either rely on pseudo-randomness, or assume that a majority of the participants are honest in submitting their randdomness share and follow the rest of the protocol. However, these participants have no incentive to contribute true random shares compared to contributing an arbitrary share in the first place. This paper presents a game-theoretic design for incentivizing participants submitting true random shares, without relying on pseudo-randomness.
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
PureLottery studies fair leader election without relying on a decentralized random number generation service, but instead leveraging a tournament among interested participants.
2024–present
Real blockchain infrastructure turns transaction ordering and admission into strategic objects: builders can exploit ordering and delay, DAG-based consensus runs concurrent proposers across overlapping transaction sets, and parallel execution engines remove some ordering constraints while introducing new manipulation surfaces via conflict graphs. My PODC brief announcement studies delay-optimal transaction order fairness, while LockFee asks what fee-mechanism desiderata survive modern architectures and how refundable collateral can restore incentive compatibility and user welfare. My work on trustless sampling of correlated equilibria extends this to a richer question: how can smart contracts act as trustless mediators implementing solution concepts beyond Nash equilibria?
Context
This is the broadest and most forward-looking of my three directions. It addresses strategic design questions that become unavoidable as blockchain infrastructure scales toward DAG, sharded, and parallel execution environments.
Core ideas
ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing · 2026
This paper presents a new relaxation of transaction order fairness concept, by requiring pairwise precedence only if the two transactions are received significantly apart in time. We also characterize its feasible parameters.
IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures · 2026
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
We present LockFee, a principal-preserving admission primitive in which each accepted transaction locks collateral for a fixed duration and recovers the principal in full afterward; users bear only the opportunity cost of locked capital.
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2025
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This paper gives two trustless smart-contract protocols for sampling correlated equilibria on blockchain, replacing the traditional trusted mediator with cryptographic techniques based on oblivious transfer and zkSNARKs.
Prior and Earlier Work
These directions contributed to my research background and inform current work, but are not active primary thrusts.
Prior work on automated static analysis for reasoning about gas consumption in smart contracts before deployment.
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
This paper presents Asparagus, an automated tool for synthesizing parametric static gas upper bounds for smart contracts. The main technical contribution is to employ sound quantifier elimination techniques based on Farkas' lemma and other algebro-geometric methods.
Earlier work on vision-language modeling for visual question answering on pathology images.
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 2021
* Equal contribution.
This paper studies visual question answering over pathology images and explores how multimodal models can answer medically grounded questions in a scientific imaging domain rather than a natural-image setting.