I am Heikichi Hayashi, also known as Tingyi Lin. I started Adrasteia Labs with friends and colleagues, and over a few years it has grown into a distinguished student research group in China. My research sits where FinTech meets EconCS: algorithmic game theory and mechanism design for blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance, backed by empirical work in economics.

I earned two bachelor's degrees, in economics and in business, at the Central University of Finance and Economics. Along the way I visited the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and worked as a research assistant 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, the Peking University National School of Development, and HKU Business School, etc.

FinTech · Economics and computation · Algorithmic game theory · Mechanism design · Tokenomics · AMMs and MEV · Empirical economics

Role
Founding Director and Department Coordinator
Primary Fields
Digital Currency & DeFi, FinTech, EconCS
Secondary Fields
Empirical Economics, AI for Social Science
Contact

Research

Research overview.

Much of my research is about tokenomics. A token bundles cash-flow claims, governance rights, and access, and its supply and allocation decide who gets paid for growing the protocol. I want to know when these incentives actually work, when they tip into pure speculation, and why token markets stay full of lemons even though every contract sits in the open.

I also study decentralized exchange. On AMMs I work on liquidity provision and pricing; on MEV I treat transaction ordering as an auction, where randomized priority rules can soften wasteful races and block builders end up taxing informed trading.

On the empirical side, I use causal inference to trace how on-chain shocks reach conventional markets.

Accepted

Accepted papers.

2026 Accepted

Adrasteia: AI Agent Workflow for Economic Paper Writing

Heikichi Hayashi, Huanxi Zhang (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Karl Yu (Boston College), Ruoran Lai (Sun Yat-sen University), and Jiazhuo Li (University of Michigan)

Accepted at the ICML 2026 Workshop on AI for Math

Presented at: EC'26 Workshop on AI-Driven Research in EconCS (oral contributed talk); Can AI Do Theory? Workshop at STOC TheoryFest 2026 (Google Research); AEA Annual Meeting 2027 (scheduled)

Under Review

Under review.

2025 Under Review

Smart Contracts, Dumb Money: Open Source Lemons

Heikichi Hayashi, Weiyu Qi (University of Chicago), Karl Yu (Boston College), and Huanxi Zhang (University of Wisconsin-Madison) (authors in alphabetical order)

Kilts Center at Chicago Booth Marketing Data Center Paper

Presented at: Bank of Italy ToDeFi 2026*; CCER Summer Institute (* presented by coauthor)

2025 Under Review

Smoothing the Cliff: Fair and Incentive-Compatible Priority Allocation via Randomized Mechanisms

Heikichi Hayashi, Weiyu Qi (University of Chicago), Karl Yu (Boston College), and Huanxi Zhang (University of Wisconsin-Madison) (authors in alphabetical order)

Presented at: EC'26 Workshop on Online Learning and Economics; 12th Tsinghua University SEM Graduate Workshop (Outstanding Presentation Paper Award); EEA-ESEM*; ESIF Economics and AI+ML Meeting (Cornell University)*; KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich*; Peking University National School of Development (* presented by coauthor)

Working Paper

Working papers.

2026 Working Paper

A Blessing in Disguise? DeFi Exploits and Short-Horizon Responses in U.S. Commercial Paper Spreads

Heikichi Hayashi and Tse Hou (University of Minnesota and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis) (authors in alphabetical order)

Working Paper

Presented at: Yale Pre-Doctoral Economics Conference (Yale Tobin Center); Asia Meeting of the Econometric Society, China (HKU Business School); FMA International European Conference*; 5th Annual Hong Kong Conference on FinTech and AI in Finance (City University of Hong Kong) (* presented by coauthor)

2025 Working Paper

The Private Enforcer: Algorithmic Deterrence and the Shadow Tax on Insider Trading

Heikichi Hayashi, Ruoran Lai (Sun Yat-sen University), Weiyu Qi (University of Chicago), and Karl Yu (Boston College) (authors in alphabetical order)

Working Paper

Presented at: Federal Reserve Board Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, Payments, and Finance (Gerzensee, Switzerland); China Financial Research Conference (Tsinghua PBCSF); Asia Meeting of the Econometric Society, China (HKU Business School); 38th Asian Finance Association Conference* (* presented by coauthor)

Projects

What we are building.

We are working hard to advance verifiable AI workflows for economic research.

We are also building large panel datasets across blockchain, DeFi, and other areas we find interesting. See projects