cs.cornell.edu/~byc /

Benjamin Y. Chan

Email: byc a t cs.cornell.edu

Bio

I am a fifth year PhD student at Cornell and Cornell Tech working on distributed algorithms and cryptography, co-advised by Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi.

Last year I was a Research Fellow at Uniswap Labs. Previously, I spent time as an engineer at Algorand implementing and testing consensus protocols, and before that I did my B.S. and M.Eng at MIT.

Publications

2023

  1. Simplex Consensus: A Simple and Fast Consensus Protocol
    Benjamin Chan and Rafael Pass
    TCC 2023. [eprint/pdf] [website] [slides]
  2. Don't Let MEV Slip: The Costs of Swapping on the Uniswap Protocol
    Austin Adams, Benjamin Chan, Sarit Markovich, and Xin Wan
    FC 2024. [eprint/pdf] [blog post]

2022

  1. Universal Reductions: Reductions Relative to Stateful Oracles
    Benjamin Chan, Cody Freitag, and Rafael Pass
    TCC 2022 [eprint/pdf] [slides]
  2. Revisiting the Power of Non-Equivocation in Distributed Protocols
    Naama Ben-David, Benjamin Chan, and Elaine Shi
    PODC 2022 [pdf] [slides]

2020

  1. Streamlet: Textbook Streamlined Blockchains
    Benjamin Chan and Elaine Shi
    AFT 2020 [eprint/pdf] [blog-post] [slides] [talk at SBC 2020]

    this protocol is taught as an intro consensus protocol in various distributed systems and blockchain classes, including at: CMU (1, 2), Stanford (1, 2), UIUC (1), Princeton (1), and more

Professional Experience

May - Sept 2023

  1. Research Fellow (Summer), Uniswap Labs
    Studying the efficiency of decentralized exchanges, and auditing them for adverse behavior. See our new notion of [reordering slippage].

2019

  1. Engineer, Algorand
    Building and testing the core Algorand consensus protocol.

Teaching

Teaching Assistantships

Links