I am Viraj, a PhD student at Princeton University where I work on financial market design in Decentralized Finance, with Prof. Pramod Viswanath. I am currently working with Supernova, a startup bringing interest rate swaps on-chain.

Research Interests - decentralized finance, control theory, machine learning, dynamic market design

My research can be found on Google Scholar or on this page or (hopefully) listed in my CV.  I have worked on adaptive DeFi protocols, renewable energy markets, and prediction markets.

The main philosophy driving my research is that careful market design is a key to human flourishing. What makes this problem difficult is knowing when to respect the bottom up nature of human society, and when to recognize market failures that prompt rules-based, rare corrective actions from a market designer. I believe that striking this balance involves decentralized and adaptive market design that takes the incentives of the participants into account.

Previous affiliations - Over my PhD summers, I have worked with DeFi startups such as Relic Labs (on adaptive AMMs for the Ritual blockchain), Nexio (on BTC powered lending) and Sentient (on iterative training of LLMs on board games). For my MS, I worked on neural decoders for error-correcting codes, at the Co-ordinated Science Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before that, I worked as a risk analyst for Goldman- Sachs for a year after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay majoring in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Computer Science. If you are interested to know more random things about me (can't imagine why) click here for my detailed background.