Current Position & Biography
James Hsin-yu Chiang describes his current position as Senior Researcher, or Oberassistent, in ETH Zurich's System Security Group, hosted by Srdjan Capkun. The institutional group directory independently confirms his ETH affiliation and office, although it still uses the earlier postdoc label. His own current research page discusses confidential distributed AI and verifiable training alongside cryptography and privacy. He received his doctorate from the Technical University of Denmark in 2023 and previously worked as a postdoc with Ivan Damgård at Aarhus.
Notable Contributions
With Massimo Bartoletti and Alberto Lluch-Lafuente, Chiang coauthored Maximizing Extractable Value from Automated Market Makers. The paper studies how transaction ordering can let an adversary extract value from users of decentralized exchanges and develops a procedure for constructing a maximizing strategy within its model. Its relevance is analytical: specifying the adversary and the market mechanism makes an economic weakness more precise. The cited version is the Financial Cryptography 2022 proceedings version with proofs in an appendix, not a live assessment of every current trading venue.
Why Katharos.ai Is Following Them
Katharos.ai follows Chiang because transaction execution is part of financial security, not merely a backend performance detail. A trade can satisfy a contract's basic validity checks while its ordering still disadvantages a user. Formal analysis helps separate that problem from unrelated claims about token prices or exchange solvency. His broader cryptographic work also creates a useful connection between privacy requirements and the infrastructure expected to enforce them.
Areas to Follow
We will follow whether proposed protections specify their adversary clearly, how models account for information visible before execution, and which assumptions survive when mechanisms are implemented. A separate question is how privacy techniques affect the ability to verify outcomes. These are research and engineering questions; describing an attack model here is not an allegation about a named operator or a recommendation to exploit users.
Reporting Scope
Switzerland denotes his current ETH Zurich research affiliation, not citizenship. Senior Researcher follows his current self-description; the institutional page corroborates the affiliation but retains the older postdoc title. This profile distinguishes historical DeFi research from his present emphasis on AI security and does not imply that one paper covers all those applications.
Sources for Further Reading
https://jachiang.github.io/ https://syssec.ethz.ch/people/james-chiang/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01870 https://www.commonprefix.com/team
Photo Credit
Portrait of James Hsin-yu Chiang supplied on the Common Prefix team page. Photographer and rights holder are not identified in the original image metadata; public display is not an unrestricted reuse license. Whole photograph downsampled and padded to 16:9 without cropping or facial alteration. Original metadata retained.
Editorial Disclaimer
This profile summarizes information from the cited sources. Katharos.ai does not endorse the subject or guarantee every source claim’s authenticity.