Current Position & Biography
Itay Tsabary researches the security of incentive-based blockchain systems. His public professional profile currently lists Microsoft and Haifa, Israel, and describes experience as a technical team lead. His personal research site links to that same professional profile and documents his work on mining incentives and smart contracts. The site’s older PhD-candidate description and an IC3 alumni reference to StarkWare are not used as evidence of a current appointment.
His research asks how a protocol behaves when participants pursue profit rather than follow a convenient script. This matters because the program governing a transaction is only one component of the system that decides whether and when it executes.
Notable Contributions
Tsabary coauthored MAD-HTLC: Because HTLC is Crazy-Cheap to Attack with Matan Yechieli, Alex Manuskin and Ittay Eyal. The work studies hashed time-locked contracts, which appear in constructions such as payment channels and atomic swaps. It examines bribery incentives and proposes a design that gives miners a role in enforcing the intended behavior: misconduct can make a participant’s funds available for confiscation. The authors analyze security through the universal-composability framework and game theory, and demonstrate implementations on Bitcoin and Ethereum. These are results within the paper’s models and experiments, not a guarantee that every deployed contract is secure or vulnerable in the same way.
Why Katharos.ai Is Following Them
Katharos.ai is following this research because the economically relevant attack surface can extend beyond a contract’s immediate users. A participant who can influence transaction selection may change the outcome without exploiting a conventional software bug. That makes incentive compatibility a security question rather than an optional economic footnote.
The work encourages a more precise reading of protocol assurances. A deadline, penalty or escrow condition should be evaluated alongside the behavior it rewards, the parties able to enforce it and the alternatives those parties can choose.
Areas to Follow
Follow the assumptions used to model rational transaction selection, how security analyses treat side payments, and whether implementation tests capture the same conditions as the formal model. For payment and swap systems, another useful question is how their safety changes when the underlying fee market becomes unusually competitive or unpredictable.
Reporting Scope
Israel reflects Haifa as self-listed on the linked professional profile, not citizenship or employer headquarters. Microsoft is a self-listed affiliation; no specific Microsoft job title or research mandate is asserted. Historical academic and StarkWare descriptions are distinguished from that current listing. The personal-site photograph is historical and is not presented as recent.
Sources for Further Reading
https://itaytsabary.github.io/ https://il.linkedin.com/in/itaytsabary https://ic3research.org/alumni/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.12031
Photo Credit
Historical portrait from Itay Tsabary’s personal research site, assets/img/profile3.jpg. Site footer: Itay Tsabary, 2022. Photographer not identified; no unrestricted reuse license established. Original JPEG application and IPTC metadata retained. The complete 1536 × 1536 photograph is reduced to 600 × 600 and placed at 340, 60 on a 1280 × 720 canvas. The source already clips the top of the hat; padding adds no further clipping. Used only for credited factual editorial identification, not endorsement.
Editorial Disclaimer
This profile summarizes information from the cited sources. Katharos.ai does not endorse the subject or guarantee every source claim’s authenticity.