Digital Currency and FinTech
Research on crypto markets, DeFi, smart contracts, and the financial microstructure of emerging digital systems.
And, behold, there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last.
καὶ ἰδοὺ εἰσὶν ἔσχατοι οἳ ἔσονται πρῶτοι, καὶ εἰσὶν πρῶτοι οἳ ἔσονται ἔσχατοι.
T.Y. Hayashi · Hong Kong — Beijing — Remote
Digital markets, mechanism design, and AI-native economic inquiry.
I am T.Y. Hayashi, also known as Tingyi Lin or Heikichi Hayashi. I am affiliated with Tropic Research Institute. My research sits where Econ meets CS: algorithmic game theory and mechanism design for blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance, backed by empirical work in economics.
I am currently at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before that I worked remotely as a research assistant for Prof. Wanlin Lin at The University of Hong Kong.
My research has been presented or will be presented at the AEA, the Federal Reserve Board Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, Payments, and Finance (Gerzensee, Switzerland), the Bank of Italy, the Yale Tobin Center, Tsinghua PBCSF, the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, Cornell University, Google Research, Tsinghua SEM, and HKU Business School, etc.
FinTech · Economics and computation · Algorithmic game theory · Mechanism design · Tokenomics · AMMs and MEV · Empirical economics
Research
Three areas shape the portfolio.
Mechanism Design and Market Design
Fair and incentive-compatible allocation rules, strategic behavior, and algorithmic game theory in financial and digital markets.
AI for Social Science
AI-driven workflows, empirical automation, and meta-science approaches for faster and more transparent research across economics and the social sciences.
News
Recent news.
- Sep 2026
Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2026: How Much Must a Private Mempool Hide? Exact Leakage Thresholds for Sandwich Attacks and When One Leak Pays Forever: Context Binding and the Price of Deterring Collusion.
Contact
Contact Hayashi.
For research inquiries, collaborations, workshop invitations, or academic correspondence, write to Hayashi directly.