Julian is a research scientist at the Robust Incentives Group at the Ethereum Foundation. His work focuses on the intersection between the application layer and the protocol layer. Using tools from finance and economics, he aims to improve the Ethereum protocol. He has worked on base fee derivatives, PBS, and MEV and now focuses on censorship resistance gadgets like inclusion lists.

Julian Ma

Protocol development needs more economists, yet many potential contributors do not know which problems are important to Ethereum protocol development. This talk bridges the gap for those interested in blockchain research who want to work on impactful problems. The talk will overview different economic research areas at the protocol level. Examples include an economic perspective on consensus systems, transaction fee mechanism design, and economic sides of current EIPs.

Stage 4

Start contributing to economic protocol development

Although fairly unrelated at first glance, MEV is currently *the* bottleneck for a censorship-resistant Ethereum. This talk will first explore why MEV and censorship resistance are fundamentally counterforces. Then, we will dive into how MEV constrains the design space of censorship-resistant gadgets like Inclusion Lists and Concurrent Block Producers. What does the future of censorship resistance look like for Ethereum?