Senior Researcher, Mechanism Design at Category Labs

<p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Category Labs</strong> (formerly known as Monad Labs) is a team of systems engineers and researchers on a mission to design and build at the frontier of decentralized technology. We strive to deliver significant improvements over existing blockchain solutions. After raising $225M in series A funding, led by Paradigm, we are growing our team.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">We’re the team behind Monad, a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1 whose public mainnet is now live. We write the core software that runs it: a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://github.com/category-labs/monad"><u>parallel-execution EVM</u></a>, a custom state database, and a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://github.com/category-labs/monad-bft"><u>BFT consensus client</u></a>, all developed in the open.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2><strong>The Role</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">We are looking for an exceptional Senior Researcher with significant academic and applied experience in economics, particularly in the context of permissionless blockchains. You will play a leading role in designing rules and mechanisms in Monad that keep the decentralized network running smoothly. You’ll be designing mechanisms that optimize for decentralization, economic security, spam prevention, compatibility with existing infrastructure, and ease of use.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><p style="min-height:1.5em">You will work closely with our engineering team to design and test various mechanisms. You’ll draw on your extensive knowledge and opinions on mechanisms in existing blockchains to evaluate options for Monad’s design that optimize its security, decentralization, and performance. You’ll work on a variety of areas, such as transaction ordering, staking, and consensus. Most importantly, your work will help our team avoid security threats and the threat of centralization.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Your work will be vital to Monad’s success and will allow Monad to scale safely to hundreds of millions of users.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2>What you’ll be doing</h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You’ll design and evaluate mechanisms that optimize for economic security, decentralization, performance, compatibility with existing infrastructure, and ease of use. A few example areas include transaction ordering (PGA vs flashbots/PBS); staking; liquid staking; spam prevention; on-chain randomness; light clients.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You’ll evaluate potential attack vectors and evaluate ways to mitigate the threat of attacks.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You’ll advise the team on technical merits of other systems that are potential partners, such as bridges and DeFi protocols.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You’ll stay up to date on mechanism design in other bl