CFP

D^2: Designing DeFi

Columbia Business School (David Geffen Hall)

New York, NY, United States, May 20-21, 2026

Conference website	http://designingdefi.xyz/
Submission link	https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=d2
Abstract registration deadline	February 14, 2026
Submission deadline	February 14, 2026

Topics: market design and mechanisms protocol incentives and robustness risk management and stability designing decentralized finance

Designing DeFi: Protocols & Incentives

May 20–21, 2026

Columbia Business School, New York City

Designing DeFi (D^2 2026) is a two-day research conference dedicated to research on the design, analysis, and evaluation of decentralized finance protocols, with a particular emphasis on incentives, economic mechanisms, and protocol-level innovation. The conference brings together researchers in academia and industry, engineers, and practitioners working at the intersection of mechanism design and the economics of novel markets and blockchain systems. Particularly, DeDeFi 2026 aims to foster rigorous discussion of how DeFi systems are designed, how they behave in adversarial and strategic environments, and how incentive structures shape outcomes at scale.

Designing DeFi builds on the success of the TLDR conference series (2024–2025), while sharpening its focus toward foundational protocol design questions. The conference is generally not intended for price analysis of cryptocurrency markets or other investor or marketing related topics. We request submissions that are engineering or scientific in nature only.

Scope and Themes

We invite submissions that study how DeFi protocols and blockchain systems are designed, how they behave in adversarial and strategic environments, and how incentive structures shape outcomes at scale.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited) to the areas below. If you are unsure about whether a topic is in scope, feel free to reach out to Bita (telegram @beetsmcgeets, email bita@uniswapfoundation.org) or one of the other chairs.

Market Design and Mechanisms

Novel designs for liquidity provision (e.g., proprietary automated market markers, request-for-quote mechanisms for trading)
Design and analysis of prediction markets (e.g., the empirical analysis of the forecasting power of prediction markets, designs for capital efficient prediction markets)
Information aggregation mechanisms
Auction design and pricing mechanisms for block building, transaction ordering, and other execution markets
Market mechanisms for specific asset classes (e.g., stablecoin trading)
Design of decentralized derivative exchanges (e.g., perpetual futures, options)

Protocol Incentives and Robustness

Frontier research on risk analysis, network security, and economic behavior arising from major protocol upgrades
Incentives and mechanisms for peer-to-peer bandwidth markets
Implications of advances in cryptography (e.g., TEE/ZK/etc.)
Bandwidth related markets (e.g., PeerDAS)
Implications of changes in MEV supply chain (e.g., ePBS)
Design and analysis of multiple proposer blockchains (e.g., incentives, censorship resistance, MEV, etc.)

Risk Management and Stability

Liquidation, auto-deleveraging, and other risk management mechanisms for decentralized trading of perpetual futures and other decentralized derivatives markets
Design and analysis of lending protocols
Stablecoin design and monetary architectures
Oracle design (e.g., for real world asset markets, for prediction markets)

Submission Guidelines

We welcome theoretical, empirical, and systems-oriented submissions, including work-in-progress, provided they offer clear technical or economic insight into DeFi protocol design.

Submissions should be written in clear, scholarly style and submitted via EasyChair portal.
Submissions may be of any length; however, the Program Committee will evaluate only the first 12 pages of each submission, with 12 point font. A minimum length of 6 pages is strongly recommended with sufficient technical detail to enable effective evaluation. Submissions with insufficient detail may be desk rejected.
Submissions may optionally be anonymized. Authors who choose to anonymize their submission should omit author names and affiliations from the PDF. Author information will be recorded in the submission system but will not be visible to reviewers aside from what is in the PDF.
Authors are responsible for declaring any conflicts of interest with Program Committee members in the designated section of the submission form.
DeDeFi is not archival and does not have proceedings. Prior or concurrent submission to other venues is permitted unless otherwise specified.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: February 14, 2026
Review period: February 22 – March 13, 2026
Notification of acceptance: Late March 2026
Conference dates: May 20–21, 2026

Program Committee

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary Program Committee drawn from academia and industry, with expertise spanning economics, cryptography, DeFi, and protocol incentive design.

Why Designing DeFi?

Designing DeFi: Protocols & Incentives is intended as a venue for work that asks not just what is happening in DeFi, but why systems behave the way they do—and how they should be designed differently.

We especially encourage submissions that:

Advance understanding of incentives in decentralized systems, and surface design trade-offs
Analyze production systems or live markets, or introduce new protocol primitives or market designs
Connect theory to real protocol behavior – bridge theory, simulation, and empirical evidence.

Beyond the two-day program, we also aim to build a platform that connects the DeFi research community, sparking ongoing discussion, collaboration, and research funding opportunities. We hope this effort helps cultivate new research interests and academic talent, and foster innovations and real-world implementations that put theory into applications and products at scale.