Decentralizing trust and disrupting power structures with cryptographic peer-to-peer exchange and distributed systems

Dan Aronoff and Neha Narula, et al. "The Hidden Plumbing of Stablecoins: Financial and Technological Risks in the GENIUS Act Era," Digital Currency Initiative, February 2026, https://dci.mit.edu/projects/hidden-plumbing-stablecoins

Samuel, Ashwanth, et al. "The GENIUS Act is Now Law. What’s Missing?," August 2025, https://www.dci.mit.edu/posts/stablecoins-genius-act

Samuel, Ashwanth, et al. "Will Stablecoins Impact the US Treasury Market?," August 2025, https://www.dci.mit.edu/posts/stablecoins-treasuries

Narula, Neha, "A new research network for Bitcoin and digital currency," August 2025, https://www.dci.mit.edu/posts/new-research-network

Samuel, Ashwanth, et al, "Stablecoins and the Limits of Existing Analogies." August 2025, https://www.dci.mit.edu/posts/stablecoin-analogies

Lin, Alicia, et al. "Evaluating usage of the Whirlpool Bitcoin privacy protocol." July 2025, https://www.dci.mit.edu/posts/coinjoin-timing-questions

Samuel, Ashwanth, et al. "1:1 Redemptions for Some, Not All." July 2025, https://www.dci.mit.edu/posts/stablecoin-redemptions-for-some-not-all

Narula, Neha. "A Decade of Digital Currency at MIT." May 2025, https://www.dci.mit.edu/posts/a-decade-of-digital-currency-at-mit

Wee Kee Toh and Michael Maurer, et al. "Designing Payment Tokens For Safety, Integrity, Interoperability, and Usability," Digital Currency Initiative, May 2025, https://www.dci.mit.edu/projects/designing-payment-tokens-for-safety-integrity-interoperability-and-usability

Gabriela Torres Vives, et al. "Enhancing the Privacy of a Digital Pound." Bank of England and MIT Digital Currency Initiative, December 2024

Stuewe, Sam et al. "Beware the Weak Sentinel: Making OpenCBDC Auditable without Compromising Privacy." Digital Currency Initiative, 25 November 2024, https://dci.mit.edu/beware-the-weak-sentinel-making-opencbdc-auditable-with-out-compromising-privacy

Toh, W., Brownworth, A., Bench, R., Li, N., and Sarwar, S. (2024). Application of Programmability to Commercial Banking and Payments. [White paper]. https:/www.media.mit.edu/publications/application-of-programmability-to-commercial-banking-and-payments

Aronoff, Daniel. (2024). Targeted Nakamoto: A Bitcoin Protocol to Balance Network Security and Energy Consumption. arXiv:2405.15089 [cs.CR]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15089

Ali, A. (2024) Scaling Privacy Preserving Payments. [Master's thesis, MIT]. https://www.mit.edu/publications/scaling-privacy-preserving-payments

Bao, C. (2024). Mitigating Undercutting Attacks: A Study on Mining and Transaction Fee Behavior. [Master's thesis, MIT]. https://media.mit.edu/publications/mitigating-undercutting-attacks-a-study-on-mining-and-transaction-fee-behavior

Bao, Claire. "Mitigating Undercutting Attacks: A Study on Mining and Transaction Fee Behavior." Digital Currency Initiative, 10 May 2024. https://dci.mit.edu/dci-graduate-students-theses

Bönsel, J. L., Maurer, M., Petriconi, S., Tundis, A., & Winstel, M. (2026). Coin selection by Random Draw according to the Boltzmann distribution. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.17490.

Aronoff, D., Ardis, I. (2024). ADESS: A Proof-of-Work Protocol to Deter Double-Spend Attacks. In: Arai, K. (eds) Advances in Information and Communication. FICC 2024. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 920. Springer, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-53963-3_11

Brownworth, Anders, et al. "A High Performance Payment Processing System Designed for Central Bank Digital Currencies." MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2022.

Utreexo demonstration release Dryja https://medium.com/mit-media-lab-digital-currency-initiative/utreexo-demonstration-release-a0d87506fd70

By Ethan Heilman (Boston Uni), Neha Narula (MIT Media Lab), Garrett Tanzer (Harvard), James Lovejoy (MIT Media Lab), Michael Colavita (Harvard), Madars Virza (MIT Media Lab), and Tadge Dryja (MIT Media Lab). Accepted at the FSE (Fast Software Encryption) Conference , which is organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), 2020

BibTeX Citation: @misc{dryja2020lower, title={A Lower Bound for Byzantine Agreement and Consensus for Adaptive Adversaries using VDFs}, author={Thaddeus Dryja and Quanquan C. Liu and Neha Narula}, year={2020}, eprint={2004.01939}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.DC}

Presented at the Cryptoeconomic Systems Summit 2020. Publication forthcoming in the Cryptoeconomic Systems Journal Edition 1

Cline, D., Narula, N., & Dryja, T. (2020). ClockWork: An Exchange Protocol for Proofs of Non Front-Running. Stanford, CA: The Stanford Blockchain Conference.

Meralli, S. Privacy-preserving analytics for the securitization market: a zero-knowledge distributed ledger technology application. Financ Innov 6, 7 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40854-020-0172-y

Ben-Sasson, Eli, et al. "Aurora: Transparent succinct arguments for R1CS." Annual international conference on the theory and applications of cryptographic techniques. Springer, Cham, 2019.

Responsible disclosure in the era of cryptocurrencies by Cory Fields. May7th 2018

Presented at the 15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in 2018

Joi Ito, Neha Narula, Robleh Ali. The Blockchain Will Do to the Financial System What the Internet Did to Media. Harvard Business Review. March 8, 2017.

June 14, 2016.

Ito, J. (2015, January 23). Why Bitcoin is and isn't like the Internet. Joi Ito's Web [Blog post]. https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2015/01/23/why-bitcoin-is-.html