cs.cornell.edu/~byc /

Benjamin Y. Chan

Email: byc a t cs.cornell.edu

Bio

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

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

Recently I've become interested in understanding how modern language models work. You can follow along at my personal site spilled.coffee.

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