Research at Ritual
Vancouver, Canada
I study how to design markets and incentive mechanisms in multi-agent systems, with particular attention to strategic manipulation, adversarial service provision, consensus incentives, and the tension between efficiency and decentralization.
Studies how protocols should procure work that is expensive to produce but cheap to verify in permissionless environments with adversarial suppliers and costly liveness failures.
The optimal design often assigns a random primary worker and a fallback committee and achieves logarithmic loss.
Maryam Bahrani · Michael Neuder · S. Matthew Weinberg
Models active block producers with MEV utility, proves impossibility results for transaction-fee mechanisms in general, and gives a searcher-assisted mechanism with a tight 1/2 welfare guarantee.
The paper formalizes MEV as a block producer’s private value for a block and shows how searcher competition can expand the transaction-fee mechanism design space.
Maryam Bahrani · Pranav Garimidi · Tim Roughgarden
Constructs a profitable selfish-mining strategy whose orphan-block pattern is statistically identical to honest mining under greater network delay.
The strategy is profitable for miners controlling 38.2% of the hash rate, showing that profitable deviations need not be detectable from the public chain.
Maryam Bahrani · S. Matthew Weinberg
Introduces a transaction-fee mechanism for heterogeneous two-sided compute markets in which broker competition leads to efficient individualized prices for users and execution nodes.
At pure Nash equilibria, Resonance produces an efficient outcome while remaining budget-balanced, individually rational, and computationally tractable.
Maryam Bahrani · Naveen Durvasula
Characterizes when rewards and leader stake can incentivize responsive block proposals, then shows that multi-leader competition can achieve responsiveness with simpler rewards and no stake requirement.
2026
Preprint
Develops a framework for evaluating cutoff selfish-mining strategies under general stochastic rewards, then applies it to a Bitcoin reward model combining the block subsidy, time-accruing fees, and occasional reward spikes.
2025
Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT)
Develops three models that quantify equilibrium stake concentration from heterogeneous rewards, the rate of concentration when rewards are reinvested, and how builder competition reduces reward differences among proposers under proposer-builder separation.
2024
Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC)
Studies truthful two-level auctions in which each bidder is a DAO with an internal bid-aggregation and cost-sharing rule, proving that a logarithmic welfare approximation is both achievable and tight.
2023
Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT)
Establishes impossibility results for two broad algorithmic frameworks for the matroid secretary problem: natural greedy algorithms and randomized partition algorithms.
2021
Web and Internet Economics (WINE)
01
Michael Neuder · Maryam Bahrani
A primer on PropAMMs, how they differ from traditional AMMs and RFQs, and what their rise could mean for Ethereum market structure.
02
Maryam Bahrani · Michael Neuder
A comparison of mechanisms that let applications constrain transaction ordering, using cancel prioritization as the central case.
03
Maryam Bahrani · Michael Neuder
How a protocol can elicit suppliers’ private computational capacity despite Sybil attacks, and the resulting tradeoff between oracle accuracy and protocol cost.
04
Maryam Bahrani · Michael Neuder
A model comparing lotteries and staked auctions for procuring zero-knowledge proofs of Ethereum blocks.
05
Maryam Bahrani · Michael Neuder
A model of anonymous participation games and the payment rules needed to induce reliable participation.
2025
Conference presentation
EthCC · Cannes, France
How a protocol should choose and compensate provers when liveness is costly and collateral is limited.
2024
Conference presentation
Devcon SEA · Bangkok, Thailand
Why multidimensional fee markets lose guarantees as transaction and node heterogeneity increases, and how the Broker Mechanism handles the fully heterogeneous setting.
2023
Conference presentation
ETHconomics 2 · Devconnect Istanbul · Istanbul, Turkey
How block producers’ private MEV utility creates impossibility results for transaction-fee mechanisms, and how searcher competition enables a tight 1/2 welfare guarantee.
I am a researcher working at the intersection of mechanism design, theoretical computer science, and decentralized systems. Much of my research studies how to design markets and protocols that remain effective in permissionless settings where participants and infrastructure operators may behave strategically or adversarially.
My work has included transaction-fee mechanisms, consensus and block-production incentives, markets for computation, and robust procurement auctions. I currently work with Ritual on mechanism design for decentralized computation. Previously, I was part of the a16z Crypto Research lab. I did graduate work at Columbia with Tim Roughgarden, and studied computer science and applied mathematics at Princeton. Before graduate school, I worked as a quantitative trader at Jane Street.