Important Dates

We offer two submission rounds to provide flexibility and early feedback to authors.

Round 1 Submission: November 15, 2025 | Notification: December 5, 2025
Round 2 Submission: December 1, 2025 | Notification: January 15, 2026
Camera-Ready Deadline: February 1, 2026
Workshop Date: March 6, 2026

All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (AoE)

We encourage early submission to receive expedited review and feedback. Authors may submit to either Round 1 or Round 2.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions to the 5th Workshop on Decentralized Finance, to be held in association with Financial Cryptography 2026. As decentralized finance (DeFi) enters a pivotal phase, the emergence of regulatory frameworks and novel market primitives is reshaping the design space. Recent legislation—particularly around stablecoins, disclosures, and governance—has sparked a wave of adaptation across the ecosystem.

Simultaneously, the rise of advanced market structures—such as perpetual trading, intent-based execution, dark liquidity pools, batch auctions, and oracle-free lending—has introduced new challenges to economic design, security, and compliance.

Moreover, the increasing deployment of AI-driven agents and automated liquidity routing bots in DeFi markets brings a new layer of complexity to auction design, market efficiency, and manipulation risk. This intersection of AI, algorithmic execution, and decentralized infrastructure opens both unprecedented opportunities and hard policy questions.

This workshop provides a forum for interdisciplinary engagement across cryptography, protocol design, financial economics, AI and machine learning, and legal theory. We welcome theoretical and empirical research, system proposals, legal analyses, and practitioner perspectives.

We particularly encourage submissions that explore design trade-offs or propose new frameworks for balancing decentralization with emerging legal and technical expectations.

Submission Types

Talk (~2 pages)

Must include abstract, title, and speaker who will attend. These talks may showcase original research or innovative software of interest to the DeFi research community.

Note: Please begin the title for talks with the text "Talk:". Selected proposals may submit a precis of the talk that is up to 4 pages in LNCS format, excluding references and appendices, for inclusion in the Workshop Proceedings. The precis will not be subject to further review.

Paper (up to 15 pages)

Complete research papers presenting novel ideas, systems, or analysis. Format: LNCS format, excluding references and appendices.

Researchers who wish to publish their full work elsewhere (e.g., in a journal) are encouraged to submit a talk proposal for the workshop.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers may be included in the workshop proceedings (TBD). We also welcome position papers, in-progress research, and system design discussions that aim to stimulate debate.

Submission Link: Submit Paper
Format: LNCS format (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

Topics of Interest

We encourage submissions on all aspects of decentralized finance, including but not limited to:

Protocol design under regulatory and institutional constraints
Stablecoin design and implementation under legal frameworks
DAO governance, liability, and transparency
Privacy-preserving KYC/AML systems
Perpetual DEXs and leveraged trading
Dark pools, intent-based routing, and off-chain execution
Institutional DeFi and permissioned interfaces
Auction design and execution in adversarial settings
Composability vs. compliance in architecture
MEV and incentive engineering
Role of AI and automated agents in DeFi execution
Prediction markets and decentralized derivatives
Empirical studies of user behavior and protocol adoption
Game theory and incentive mechanisms in DeFi
Governance attacks, fork coordination, and protocol resilience
Cross-chain liquidity fragmentation and L1/L2 interoperability
Use and design of oracles in DeFi systems
Security of smart contracts and protocol vulnerabilities
CBDCs and their interaction with DeFi systems
Privacy and data leakage in open financial networks

Organizing Committee

Brad Bachu
Uniswap Labs

Nir Chemaya
Ben Gurion University

Fahad Saleh
University of Florida

Xin Wan
Uniswap Labs

Program Committee

Program Chairs

Kite Liu
Uniswap Labs

Ciamac Moallemi
Columbia University / Paradigm

Program Committee Members

James Austgen
Cornell University

Andrea Canidio
CoW Protocol

Fayçal Drissi
University of Oxford

Michele Fabi
Télécom Paris

Chuck Fang
Drexel University

Zachary Feinstein
Stevens Institute of Technology

Matheus Xavier Ferreira
University of Virginia

Pranav Garimidi
a16z crypto

Rod Garratt
UC Santa Barbara

Joshua Gutow
Uniswap Labs

Chuxin Huang
OP Labs

Ruizhe Jia
Stanford University

Kose John
New York University

Jiasun Li
George Mason University

Gordon Liao
Circle

Cong Lin
Cornell University

Evgeny Lyandres
Tel Aviv University

Akaki Mamageishvili
Offchain Labs

Dahlia Malkhi
UC Santa Barbara

Jason Milionis
Monad Labs

Mike Neuder
Princeton University

Mallesh Pai
Tempo Labs

Andreas Park
University of Toronto

Max Resnick
Anza

Tim Roughgarden
Columbia University / a16z crypto

Danning Sui
Pantera Capital

Mark Toda
Uniswap Labs

Aviv Yaish
Yale University

Fan Zhang
Yale University

Jackie Zhang
Uniswap Foundation

Brian Zhu
Columbia University

Marius Zoican
University of Calgary

Additional committee members to be announced

Contact

For questions or inquiries, please contact: defi26@ifca.ai