Decentralized Finance: A Practitioners Panel

Moderator

Ciamac C. Moallemi

Columbia University

Ciamac C. Moallemi is William von Mueffling Professor of Business in the Decision, Risk, and Operations Division and the director of the Briger Family Digital Finance Lab at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, where he has been since 2007. A high school dropout, he received S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1996). He studied at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a Master of Advanced Study degree in Mathematics (Part III of the Mathematical Tripos), with distinction (1997). He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (2007). Prior to his doctoral studies, he developed quantitative methods in a number of entrepreneurial ventures: as a partner in a $200 million fixed-income arbitrage hedge fund and as the director of scientific computing at an early-stage drug discovery start-up. He holds editorial positions at the journals Operations Research and Management Science. He is a past recipient of the British Marshall Scholarship (1996), the Benchmark Stanford Graduate Fellowship (2003), first place in the INFORMS Junior Faculty Paper Competition (2011), and the Best Simulation Publication Award of the INFORMS Simulation Society (2014). Aside from his academic work, he regularly consults for fintech companies. His research interests are in the development of mathematical and computational tools for optimal decision making under uncertainty, with a focus on applications areas including market microstructure, quantitative and algorithmic trading, and blockchain technology.

Panelists

Matt Cushman

Ajna Labs

Matt Cushman is a co-founder and strategist at Ajna Labs. Previously, he founded and served as CEO of Etale Inc, a cryptocurrency trading platform that was acquired by NYDIG, where he subsequently served as Head of Electronic Trading. Prior to that, Matt worked in several senior roles in quantitative and electronic trading, including Portfolio Manager/Partner at Engineers Gate and Senior Managing Director at Citadel Securities. Before that, he was Managing Director and Head of Quantitative Strategies at Knight Capital Group.

Matt has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and MS/BS degrees in Mathematics/Philosophy/Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He also founded and serves as President of Village Garage Distillery, a craft spirits brand based in his original hometown, Bennington, Vermont.

Gordon Liao

Circle

Gordon Liao is the Chief Economist at Circle, responsible for shaping the economic agenda for the firm. Prior to joining Circle, Gordon served at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors as an economist. His experience also spans from fixed income portfolio management at the Harvard Management Company to leading research at Uniswap Labs. His academic work has been published in journals such as the Review of Financial Studies and Journal of Financial Economics.

Aseem Sood

Uniswap Labs

Aseem Sood is a Product Lead at Uniswap Labs. He helped build and launch Uniswap v3, which provided massive increases in capital efficiency through its concentrated liquidity feature. Prior to that, he co-founded Open Collective, a startup that provides bank accounts, expense management and fundraising tools for grassroots communities like Open Source Projects, meetups, etc. Before that, he spent almost a decade in Silicon Valley as a Product Manager at Dropbox and Google.