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.
I also had some pre-PhD publications in Finance as my work was mainly as a quant crypto trader and I always had some interest in academic research:
Cardoso, R, Jelihoviski, A., Leite, R., Civitarese, J. (2020). Job Market Compensation for Cognitive Reflection Ability in Financial Services. Research in Economics, 74(1), 87-93.
Leite, R. O., & Civitarese, J. (2019). Microfinance for women: Are there economic reasons? Evidence from Latin America. Economics Bulletin, 39(1), 571-580.
Civitarese, J. (2016). Volatility and correlation-based systemic risk measures in the US market. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 459, 55-67.
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. Send me an email if you like to talk about collaborations in social media and methods!