Previous to my academic research, I once had a strong interest in cryptocurrencies. I was active on the cryptocurrency community in Brazil through typical industry roles. My former professional activities are:
Partner at Polvo Capital
Columnist at Investing.com Brazil
Advisor at Hathor Network
Nonetheless, my activities were not restricted to industry activities as some problems were better worked in academic terms. I wrote some "policy" papers when something patently suspicious happens in the debates about cryptocurrencies. Some of these reports were presented to regulators or to the academic community in national conferences. A list of them can be seen below:
Civitarese, J., & Mendes, L. (2019). Bad News, Technical Development and Cryptocurrencies Stability.
Civitarese, J. (2018). Does Metcalfe's Law Explain Bitcoin Prices?
Civitarese, J. (2018). Risk Aversion and 51% Attack Resistance in Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrencies.
As with any former crypto bro, I’m currently into AI. In the 2025–2026 academic year, I’ll be working as an AI research scientist at Palver, a social media company for politics in Latin America. My work focuses on building scalable and replicable text-as-data algorithms, especially for detecting political debates in massive datasets. I like to think of my job as glorified linear algebra with a touch of category theory — though I’m also diving into research on LLMs and other modern NLP applications. Send me an email if you like to talk about collaborations in social media and methods!