Dr. Li received Ph.D. in finance from UCLA Anderson School of Management and B.S. in mathematics from Fudan University (Shanghai, China) prior to joining George Mason. His current research interest is in the business issues of emerging technologies (typically at the intersection of business, economics, and computer science), with a focus on blockchain technologies and FinTech applications. His research has appeared in leading business journals including the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science as well as major computer science outlets including ACM Web (WWW), Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), and Financial Cryptography (FC), among others. His ongoing research is recognized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award and Ethereum Foundation Academic Grants along with many other grants/gifts, and his past work has won the Exponential Science Pioneers Award, Yihong Xia Best Paper Award and Chicago Quantitative Alliance (CQA) academic paper competition along with many other paper prizes. He has taught blockchain technologies to executive, MBA, and undergraduate students, served on the committees of major blockchain conferences such as ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), CCS DeFi, Financial Crypto, IEEE ICBC, and TL;DR, and partnered with the U.S. government and private sectors on blockchain research. Students in the Master of Management program have voted him the sole recipient of "Faculty of the Year" from the entire faculty. 

Dr Li's research papers cover a wide range of topics and blend both theoretical modeling and empirical analyses: they analyze the industrial organization of cryptocurrency mining pools, their implications for blockchain (de-)centralization and electricity consumption, cryptocurrency mining's role in renewable energy adoption and (counterintuitive) potentials for reducing carbon emission, strategic incentives in distributed consensus protocols, crypto tokens' roles in jumpstarting platforms, factor structures in cryptocurrency returns, forensic analysis on crypto exchanges and on-chain transactions, crypto derivatives, cross-chain communication and interoperability, incentive issues in blockchain scaling solutions, reliability of blockchain explorers, fundamental demand for cryptocurrencies, Web3 participant profiles, and the security design of investment crowdfunding to help investors and entrepreneurs harness "wisdom of the crowd." His research papers also cover other topics like governance, human-generative AI interaction, information economics, market microstructure, mechanism design, the theory of the firm, and traffic control. 

Dr. Li is a frequent speaker, with invitations from a wide range of academic and regulatory institutions including Carnegie Mellon (Dept. Computer Science), Michigan (Ross School of Business), MIT (Sloan School of Management), Northwestern (Pritzker School of Law), NYU (Stern School of Business), UC Berkeley (Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing), Yale (Cowles Foundation for Economics; Applied Cryptography Lab), National Bureau of Economic Research, the Federal Reserve, IMF, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security National Training Center. A non-technical overview talk on some of his earlier blockchain research can be found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IybadmGPtM

Selected working papers:

Bitcoin Mining for Carbon Emission Reduction (with Hang Ren and Ioannis Bellos)

Bitcoin mining may (counterintuitively) reduce carbon emission when the electricity pricing policies are well-designed! 

An Economic Model of Consensus on Distributed Ledgers (with Hanna Halaburda and Zhiguo He)

Knigtian uncertainty & ambiguity aversion are useful tools for modeling Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) problems in strategic environments. 

Management Science, R&R

Featured in Chainlink Research Report

An Information Economics Perspective on the Impact of Generative AI on Journalism (solo-authored)

An exploration into how the proliferation of generative AI may affect journalism. 

MIS Quarterly, R&R

On the Incentive Compatibility of Optimistic Blockchain Mechanisms (solo-authored)

Optimistic rollups and other similar mechanisms have an intrinsic incentive-incompatibility issue! 

Inflation Expectation and Cryptocurrency Investment (with Will Cong, Pulak Ghosh, Qihong Ruan, and Artem Streltsov)

Higher inflation expectations drive households to buy Bitcoin and USD-pegged stablecoin! 

2025 Research Symposium on Finance and Economics Best Paper Award

Accepted to present at ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT’25)

Arbitrary Message Passing across Blockchains and Implications for Financial Markets (with Zhengxun Wu)

A unified framework to understand the Arbitrary Message Passing problem and its implications for the financial market. 

Research Policy, Accept with minor revision

Technical version selected for short talk at IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P)

All-Way Stops (solo-authored)

Installing stop signs in each direction at crossroads encourages traffic violations & harms environment -- removing one solves the problem! 

Featured in Marginal Revolution, Politico, Phys.org

Selected in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management annual meeting

(Data) Mining the Ethereum Open-Source Development Community (with Mariia Petryk)

What do the data on GitHub development activities and coworking records tell us about Ethereum's development?  

Journal of Operations Management, R&R

Project website with data, codes, and interactive visualization tools

Cryptocurrency Exchange Listings (with Mei Luo, Muzhi Wang, and Zhe Wei)

The more regulated Coinbase sees higher listing returns than the less regulated Binance -- the latter also see conflict of interest with VC arm.

Accepted to present at ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT’25)

Profit Sharing: A Contracting Solution to Harness the Wisdom of the Crowd (solo-authored)

How should privately-informed investors jointly investing in a risky project divide profits? The answer may differ from your first thought. 

CICF Yihong Xia Best Paper Award

Pietro Giovannini Memorial Prize Best Paper Award

Best Theory Paper by PhD Student from EFA

Best PhD Student Paper from KFUPM

Best Paper from AFBC PhD Forum (1st Prize)

Featured in Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog on corporations and the capital markets

Illiquid Bitcoin Options (with Yang Guo, Mei Luo and Yintian Wang)

US-regulated Bitcoin options tend to be highly illiquid, which significantly impacts their pricing.  

Bayesian Implementation with Contingent Schedules (solo-authored)

Conjecture: efficient mechanisms are always implementable with a relaxed solution concept...
even under interdependent signals & non-quasilinear preferences (one proof yet to be closed).  

Director Networks, Mobility, and Governance: Evidence from Corporate Bankruptcies (with Shenje Hshieh and Nim Patel)

Connections matter for getting board seats -- friend's loss of board seats harms a director's own mobility but may benefit his/her firm.  

The Firm as a Knowledge Aggregator (solo-authored)

The contractual relationship within a partnership firm incentivies direct or indirect communication and glues human capital together.

Invited to submit by Management Science

(Work-in-progress): Religiosity, Culture, and a Crypto Bank Run (with Jonathan Schulz and Walter Stover)

How do depositors with different religious and cultural characteristics behave when facing a run?  

(Work-in-progress): Tariffs, Trade Deficits, and Asset Valuations 

Prediction: If tariff brings down trade deficits, it will likely also bring down U.S. asset valuations.   

(Work-in-progress): Current Landscape of the Real-World Asset (RWA) Tokenization Ecosystem (with project team)

A deep dive into the industrial organization, legal structure, regulatory framework, and on-chain activities on 180+ RWA products.    

(Work-in-progress): Solving the Replication Crisis in Academia with Trusted-Execution Environment (TEE) (with project team)

Proposing TEE as a promising solution for fighting the replication crisis in academia, with accompanied feasibility demonstrations. 

Publications

Fintech, Econ-CS, and emerging technologies topics:

A Unified and Flexible Approach for Evaluating MEV Systems with Cooperative Games (with Zhengxun Wu)

What does Shapley value tell us about the division of gains/losses in the MEV supply chain? 

(To appear) Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer & Communications Security DeFi Workshop (CCS DeFi’25)

An Empirical Study on Cross-chain Transactions: Costs, Inconsistencies, and Activities (with Kailun Yan, Bo Lu, Pranav Agrawal, Wenrui Diao, and Xiaokuan Zhang)

The first large-scale measurement study on cross-chain bridges.

Proceedings of the ACM Asia Conference on Computer & Communications Security (ACM AsiaCCS’25)

Digital Tokens and Platform Building (with William Mann)

How can digital tokens with no outside value help jumpstart platforms? A game-theoretical analysis.    

Review of Financial Studies (lead article & editor’s choice), Volume 38, Issue 7, July 2025, Pages 1921–1954

Featured in Dartmouth College Tuck Business Forum on Private Equity and Venture Capital

(De)Centralization in Blockchain Open-Source Development Community (with Mariia Petryk)

Based on GitHub activities, initially decentralized open-source communities tend to gravitate toward more centralized structures.

Proceedings of the 58th HICSS, January 2025, Pages 4638-4647.

Direct Evidence of Bitcoin Wash Trading (with Arash Aloosh)

Undeniable evidence of wash trading from internal exchange records; also an evaluation of indirect estimation methods.  

Management Science, Vol. 70, No. 12, December 2024, Pages 8875-8921.

Don’t Trust, Verify: The Case of Slashing from a Popular Ethereum Explorer (with Zhiguo He and Zhengxun Wu)

Detect & explain how the explorer messed up -- according to its data 75%+ slashable violations on Ethereum were not never caught... 

Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (WWW 2023). Pages 1078–1084

Diversification Across Mining Pools: Optimal Mining Strategies under PoW (with Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Foteini Baldimtsi & Igor Griva)

A robo-advisor on how to allocate computing powers across mining pools for the optimal risk-return trade-off.  

Journal of Cybersecurity, Volume 8, Issue 1, 2022

Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2019)

Decentralized Mining in Centralized Pools (with Will Cong and Zhiguo He)

What are the decentralizing forces against mining pools re-centralizing Bitcoin mining? How do pools drive electricity consumption?  

Review of Financial Studies, Volume 34, Issue 3, March 2021, Pages 1191–1235

Exponential Science Pioneers Award

CIFFP Excellent Paper Award

Measuring Illicit Activity in DeFi: the case of Ethereum (with Foteini Baldimtsi, Joao P. Brandao, Maurice Kugler, Rafeh Hulays, Eric Showers, Zain Ali, and Joseph Chang)

Estimates using proprietary labeling data from the Blockchain Intelligence Group (BIG) and machine learning algorithms.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12676, pp 197-203

Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021) DeFi Workshop

Initial Coin Offerings: Current Research and Future Directions (with William Mann)

A survey of the literature on theoretical and empirical studies of initial coin offerings (ICOs) by mid-2019.

The Palgrave Handbook of Technological Finance, (2021), pp. 369-393

(editor Raghavendra Rau, Robert Wardrop, and Luigi Zingales, invited contribution with peer review)

DeFi as an Information Aggregator (solo-authored)

Highlighting the often-neglected potential of DeFi and smart contracts for improving the information aggregation role of financial markets. 

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12676, pp 171-176

Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021) DeFi Workshop

Toward a Factor Structure in Crypto Asset Returns (with Guanxi Yi)

One of the first studies into whether the crypto market already see factor structures emerging. Elusive evidence at time of study.  

Journal of Alternative Investment, Mar 2019, 21 (4) 56-66 (invited contribution with peer review)

Other topics:

Reproducibility in Management Science (with the Reproducibility Collaboration)

How good are the mandatory replication packages on Management Science? 

Management Science, 2024, Volume 70, Issue 3, March 2024, Pages:1343–1356

Information Aggregation via Contracting (solo-authored)

Well-designed contracts could complement the information aggregation roles of financial markets as in noisy REE models. 

Journal of Finance, Volume 78, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 935–965

How do Passive Funds Act as Active Owners? Evidence from Mutual Fund Voting Records (with Shenje Hshieh and Michael Tang)

No discernable difference in voting behavior -- influence may come from "behind-the-scene" channels. 

Journal of Corporate Finance, 2021, Vol. 66

Slow Price Adjustment to Public News in After-Hours Trading (solo-authored)

Self-tested trading strategy that beats the market by over 10% per year without proportional risk.
(for those who think this statement suggests an ignorance of asset pricing theory, think twice about your theory!
  Folks with similar dogmatic views have been arguing Bitcoin worth zero for over a decade...)   

Journal of Trading (highlight article), Summer 2016, Vol. 11, No. 3: pp. 16–31 

Chicago Quantitative Alliance (CQA) Academic Competition Best Paper (2nd Prize)

Featured in Alpha Architect