Research
Research
Decentralized Finance & Financial Technology
WORKING PAPERS
Auctioning Time to Mitigate Latency Races: Theory and Evidence from Blockchains
Agostino Capponi and Brian Z. Zhu
Accepted to Economics and Computation 2026
Selected presentations: Economics and Computation, China International Conference in Finance, WBS Gillmore Centre, Designing DeFiÂ
The Paradox of Just-in-Time Liquidity in Decentralized Exchanges: More Providers Can Lead To Less Liquidity
Agostino Capponi, Ruizhe Jia, and Brian Z. Zhu
Under Review at Management Science
Runner-Up: 2025 INFORMS Finance Section Student Paper Competition
Featured in an Ava Labs Podcast
Selected presentations: China International Conference in Finance, UChicago Stevanovich Center, The Latest in DeFi Research
Privacy-Enhanced Payment Systems
Agostino Capponi, Michael J. Lee, and Brian Z. Zhu
Working Paper
Coverage by the Global Risk Institute
Selected presentations: Bank of Canada, Swiss National Bank, European Financial Association, GSU AI & FinTech Conference
From Pools to Books: A Microstructure Mapping of DeFi Liquidity
Agostino Capponi and Brian Z. Zhu
Under Revision at Operations Research
Featured in a Bloomberg Quant Seminar
CONFERENCE & WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS
Quantifying the Value of Revert Protection
Brian Z. Zhu, Xin Wan, Ciamac C. Moallemi, Dan Robinson, and Brad Bachu
Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2025
What Drives Liquidity on Decentralized Exchanges?
Brian Z. Zhu, Dingyue Liu, Xin Wan, Gordon Liao, Ciamac C. Moallemi, and Brad Bachu
Cryptoasset Analytics Workshop 2025
Uniform-Loss Automated Market Makers for Prediction Markets
Ciamac C. Moallemi, Dan Robinson, and Brian Z. Zhu
Accepted to Advances in Financial Technologies 2026
Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence
WORKING PAPERS
Semantic Trading: Agentic AI for Clustering and Discovery in Prediction Markets
Agostino Capponi, Alfio Gliozzo, Brian Z. Zhu
Working Paper
PUBLICATIONS
Unsupervised machine learning reveals slab hydration variations from deep earthquake distributions beneath the northwest Pacific
Gilbert L. Mao, Thomas P. Ferrand, Jiaqi Li, Brian Z. Zhu, Ziyi Xi, Min Chen
Communications Earth and Environment, Vol. 3, Art. 56 (2022)