Mahdi Zamani

Director

Research areas: Security and Privacy, Distributed Computing, and Blockchain Protocols 

Mahdi is the Director of the Digital Currencies Research team at Visa Research. He joined Visa as a Staff Research Scientist in November 2016 after finishing his postdoctoral studies at Yale University. Mahdi received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico in 2015. 

At Visa Research, Mahdi is building the next generation of financial systems that rely on digital currencies including fully decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum as well as semi-decentralized ones like stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Mahdi’s typical workday consists of meetings with scientists, product managers, engineers, financial experts, and business leads. 

Mahdi enjoys designing cryptographic protocols that live on distributed systems (e.g., blockchains) to process payments at a massive scale with mathematical resilience guarantees against faults and corruptions. He also loves biking, hiking, and working from public places like coffeeshops and restaurants.


Conferences