Mahdi is the Director of Crypto Solutions at Visa. Prior to his current role, Mahdi led the Digital Currency Research team at Visa for two years and spent five years as a research scientist at Visa Research. Mahdi has shaped Visa's technical leadership in the cryptocurrency space, particularly in the areas of scalability, interoperability, and privacy.

Together with the Visa Crypto team, Mahdi is building products for the next generation of financial systems that will operate on tokenized assets which are digital representations of ownable items, created on a blockchain. This includes, but is not limited to, currencies, deposits, securities, real estate, and agricultural produce.

Compared with traditional financial systems, tokenized asset platforms require less bureaucracy, fewer middlemen, and reduced legal fees. They also enhance the liquidity of assets, offer round-the-clock trading facilities, and are inherently more robust against cyber threats and breaches, if implemented correctly. These advantages are attributed to the key design features of decentralized systems, such as interoperability and verifiability, which are typically absent in traditional cloud-based systems.

Throughout his career, Mahdi has led and published a number of influential projects in the blockchain space, most notably in blockchain sharding (RapidChain), confidential smart contracts (Zether), superlight clients for Bitcoin & Ethereum (FlyClient), and trustless bridges for Ethereum (UPC).

Mahdi's work in the blockchain space has been the subject of many news coverages by outlets such as by Business Insider, Nasdaq, Forbes, Yahoo Finance, CoinDesk, and CoinTelegraph. Also, some of his work have been adopted by JP Morgan Chase, Ethereum Foundation, Zcash, and Harmony. Mahdi's work with Visa Research on privacy-enhancing technologies for financial crime prevention received a special recognition award from the White House.