Abhimanyu Nag

Research and Engineering at University of Alberta

I study security incentives, adversarial behavior and market design in decentralized systems.

Portrait of Abhimanyu Nag
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About

I will go on a career sabbatical for family and health from July 2026 onwards. Will resume next year.

I have been a MITACS Fellow working with Dr. Michael Kouritzin at the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Alberta to develop innovative technology for Muchlearning where I served concurrently as Engineering Manager since February 2026. I was also an advising Quantitative Research Scientist at Catalysis Labs to develop pricing algorithms for DeFi insurance.

Previously, I used to work in the industry in Financial Risk Management, particularly in Decentralized Finance (DeFi). I started my career at Nethermind as a Data Scientist and most recently I served as Chief Scientist at Chainrisk Labs (Antler-backed), where I led research and advised our clients on DeFi risk parameters, formal verification of DeFi protocols and economic attack prevention. Before coming back to UAlberta, I also had a brief stint at Pantera Capital's hedge fund TanX as Lead Risk Simulations where I was leading the development of quantitative risk models for trading decisions.

My industry research has focused on risk modelling, algorithmic game theory, and economic security in decentralized systems. My current work is in modelling Sybil attacks in competitive markets (see recent paper) and analyzing security properties of decentralized protocols, with a particular interest in consensus engineering and secure market design in blockchain transaction fee mechanisms, governance systems, and multi-agent coordination problems in AI.

See my Google Scholar for my research publications and my blog for some of my more informal perspectives related to my work.
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Updates

Talks at DeFi Security Summit and Devcon 8

Presented work on modelling cryptoeconomic attacks in DeFi at DSS and on Sybil attacks in Ethereum inclusion-list mechanisms at Devcon 8 in Mumbai.

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Selected publications

Sybil Proof Auction Mechanisms via Stitching

Abhimanyu Nag, Yotam Gafni, Aviv Yaish

View all publications →
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Latest writing

Fetching the latest posts…

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Talks

Sybil Attacks on Inclusion List Mechanisms: FOCIL and AUCIL

How to Model Cryptoeconomic Attacks and Adversaries in DeFi

MAIDs for Governance Protocols

Security and Mechanism Design in DeAI

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Experience

MITACS Fellow / Engineering Manager

University of Alberta / MuchLearning ↗

Transitioned to Engineering Manager role at Muchlearning. Led a team of engineers and oversaw the development and production of our Learning Management System using industry tools such as node.js for development, CICD best practices for production pipelines, AWS tools for database management and infrastructure tooling.

Part-time Research Scientist

Catalysis Labs

Developed insurance coverage and premium algorithms for DeFi vaults using actuarial risk loading, stochastic simulation, and quantitative risk management. Co-developed an economic-security model for multiple restaking architectures published at MARBLE 2025.

Simulation Engineer

Pantera Capital's TanX

Evaluated digital-asset trading strategies using the Kelly criterion, risk-of-ruin analysis, portfolio hedging, and large-scale stochastic and quasi-Monte Carlo simulation.

Chief Scientist

Chainrisk Labs ↗

Led innovation in preventing economic exploits and attacks in decentralized markets at this Antler-backed startup. Developed governance attack prediction on Compound Finance using Multi-Agent Influence Diagrams (presented at ETH Tokyo & Coinfest Bali).

Protocol Economics Researcher

Hyperspace Protocol

Worked on incentive design on EigenLayer and optimal transaction dissemination protocols at this supercomputing L1 turned Distributed AI company.

Junior Data Scientist

Nethermind ↗

Got cited in the Ethereum Yellow Paper (EIP-5133) for accurately predicting ETH's difficulty bomb delay. Conducted stress tests for TwinStake and MEV modeling with MEV-Boost.

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Education

BSc. in Statistics

University of Alberta

Prof. Arno Berger and Prof. Michael Kouritzin