Email: [email protected] Twitter: @ghiliweld Github: @ghiliweld Website Blog

Skills: Rust, Solidity, Python, JS/NodeJS/TypeScript, Haskell

Education: Joint Major in Mathematics & Computer Science @ McGill University

Notable Courses: Algorithm Design, Algorithmic Game Theory, Linear Optimization, Honours Algebra 3, Language-based Security

Work Experience

Economic Researcher @ HashCloak (Current)

HashCloak is a blockchain R&D lab that also offers a number of services for blockchain companies, such as: R&D and initial prototyping, security and economic audits. As the economic researcher on the team, I am in charge of spearheading our economic research efforts as well as leading on economic audits for our clients.

Our clients come to us with an idea/spec for a mechanism and we determine whether the mechanism satisfies its stated goals and is not vulnerable to any economic attacks. We employ methods like agent based modeling to model behaviours of the participating agents in a mechanism, using cadCAD for simulating our agents and environment. We then run simulations of the mechanism against a number of financial and strategic attacks to verify and ensure the mechanism is safe against any economic vulnerabilities.

Smart Contract/Backend Engineer @ Rainbow (Summer 2022)

My first project at Rainbow was a Gnosis Safe module on top of their Swaps Router smart contract. The router directed trades to either the 1inch or 0x aggregator contracts, and collected fees on those swaps. Since the router is controlled by a Gnosis multisig, collecting the fees required t-of-n signers’ signatures and was cumbersome. Implementing a Gnosis Safe module allowed us to automate fee collection on a regular basis with a simple script. The contract for the module was written in Solidity using Foundry. The project isn’t open sourced but is available on request.

The next project was an arbitrage bot written in Rust, which was part of Rainbow’s strategy to monetize orderflow without harming their users. It wasn’t prod ready right away, and was more for validating whether arbitrage was a profitable revenue source for Rainbow, and as such was implemented naively to get a lower bound on the profits. We got pricing data from 1inch and 0x’s APIs to calculate arbitrage amounts and profits.

Backend Engineer @ Eternal (Summer 2020 - December 2021)

• I work on the backend API for managing accounts and relationships between users (API in Express + PostgreSQL for the DB)
• Also set up scheduled cron jobs and our analytics (around users and groups) at Eternal
• Took the initiative on user safety design to ensure we were designing a safer social network

Open Source Contributor for the Braid Protocol (Winter 2020)

• Wrote a brief summary on the Braid Protocol here
• Implemented server middleware in Haskell (WAI) to automatically "braidify" requests and responses
• This middleware adds support for subscriptions to GET requests and Versioning over HTTP
• package code here: wai-braid

Distributed Sytems Engineer @ 3box (Summer & Fall 2019)

• I worked on Ghost Threads (code here), an ephemeral messaging API on IPFS
• This entailed working with a pubsub library on IPFS and signalling server for connecting remote peers to each other
• Designed and implemented the API, with features like moderation & filters + multimedia support

Notable Work & Research

Independent Research Project in Computer Science (COMP 400): I’m currently working on a research project in Algorithm Design and Convex Optimization supervised by Prof. Adrian Vetta. The title of the project is Optimal Sandwiching on a Network of CFMMs and is similar to the paper on Optimal Routing for CFMMs. Much like the optimal routing paper, this paper takes a look at a common MEV strategy and translates it into the language of convex optimization, as well as provides a method for computing the optimal sandwich bundle.