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I am a Senior Researcher at Category Labs. I received my PhD in Computer Science from Cornell Tech and IC3, where I was incredibly fortunate to be advised by Prof. Ari Juels. My research interests and experience span a variety of fields: Distributed Systems, Blockchains, Security, Applied Cryptography and Formal Verification.

I obtained my undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Bombay, where I worked on program verification with Prof. Supratik Chakraborty and NLP with Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti.

Prior to joining Cornell, I worked as a Quantitative Researcher and Low Latency C++ Engineer at a proprietary High Frequency Trading Firm in Mumbai and Singapore.

Updates

• [May'26] MonadBFT, Weighted BTE, Timing Games, and Spam MEV will be presented at SBC 2026!
• [May'26] Weighted BTE received the Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE S&P 2026!
• [May'26] New ePrint: Cryptocurrency-Backed Trustless Anonymous Tokens and Their Applications.
• [April'26] Timing Games in Responsive Consensus Protocols accepted to ACM CCS 2026!
• [April'26] Companion blog post for the Spam MEV paper.
• [March'26] Will present PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World at IEEE EuroS&P in Lisbon!
• [March'26] Paper on Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains is online!

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Publications

Preprints

• EVM Workloads in the Wild: Evidence for Multi-Dimensional Gas Metering, State Growth, Delayed Execution, and Parallelism [PDF]
  Lioba Heimbach, Kushal Babel, Jason Milionis
  ArXiv Preprint, 2026. D² 2026.


• Cryptocurrency-Backed Trustless Anonymous Tokens and Their Applications [PDF]
  Amit Agarwal, Kushal Babel, Sourav Das, Ari Juels, Peter Rindal, Aayush Yadav
  IACR ePrint, 2026


• Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains [PDF]
  Wenhao Wang, Aditya Saraf, Lioba Heimbach, Kushal Babel, Fan Zhang
  ArXiv Preprint, 2026. SBC 2026.


• MonadBFT: Fast, Responsive, Fork-Resistant Streamlined Consensus [PDF]
  Mussadiq Jalalzai, Kushal Babel, Jovan Komatovic, Tobias Klenze, Sourav Das, Fatima Elsheimy, Mike Setrin, John Bergschneider, Babak Gilkalaye
  ArXiv Preprint, 2025. SBC 2026.
  Adopted by the Monad Blockchain

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Conferences and Journals

• Weighted Batched Threshold Encryption with Applications to Mempool Privacy [PDF]
  Amit Agarwal, Kushal Babel, Sourav Das, Babak Poorebrahim Gilkalaye, Arup Mondal, Benny Pinkas, Peter Rindal, Aayush Yadav
  IEEE S&P 2026
  Also at SBC 2026.
  Distinguished Paper Award


• Timing Games in Responsive Consensus Protocols [PDF]
  Kaya Alpturer, Kushal Babel, Aditya Saraf
  ACM CCS 2026
  Also at SBC 2026.


• PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World [PDF] [Code] [Website] [SBC'24 Talk]
  Kushal Babel, Nerla Jean-Louis, Yan Ji, Ujval Misra, Mahimna Kelkar, Kosala Yapa Mudiyanselage, Andrew Miller, Ari Juels
  IEEE EuroS&P 2026
  Also at SBC 2024.


• Liquefaction: Privately Liquefying Blockchain Assets [PDF]
  James Austgen, Andrés Fábrega, Mahimna Kelkar, Dani Vilardell, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel, Jay Yu, Ari Juels
  IEEE S&P 2025
  Also at SBC 2025.


• Voting-Bloc Entropy: A New Metric for DAO Decentralization [PDF]
  Andrés Fábrega, Amy Zhao, Jay Yu, James Austgen, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel, Mahimna Kelkar, Ari Juels
  USENIX Security 2025
  Also at SBC 2025.


• Mysticeti: Reaching the Limits of Latency with Uncertified DAGs [Video] [PDF] [Code]
  Kushal Babel, Andrey Chursin, George Danezis, Anastasios Kichidis, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Arun Koshy, Alberto Sonnino, Mingwei Tian
  NDSS 2025
  Also at SBC 2025.
  Adopted by the Sui Blockchain
  Adopted by IOTA
  Adopted by Ika


• Complete Knowledge: Preventing Encumbrance of Cryptographic Secrets [PDF] [Code] [Blog Post]
  Mahimna Kelkar*, Kushal Babel*, Philip Daian*, James Austgen, Vitalik Buterin, Ari Juels
  ACM CCS 2024
  Also at SBC 2024.


• Lanturn: Measuring Economic Security of Smart Contracts Through Adaptive Learning [PDF] [Code] [Slides] [SBC'23 Talk]
  Kushal Babel*, Mojan Javaheripi*, Yan Ji, Mahimna Kelkar, Farinaz Koushanfar, Ari Juels
  ACM CCS 2023
  Also at SBC 2023.


• Clockwork Finance: Automated Analysis of Economic Security in Smart Contracts [PDF] [Slides] [SBC'22 Talk]
  Kushal Babel*, Philip Daian*, Mahimna Kelkar*, Ari Juels
  IEEE S&P 2023
  Also at SBC 2022.
  SCRF Research Impact Award
  Best 2023 DeFi Paper (awarded by the DeFi Workshop at CCS 2024)


• Charlotte: Reformulating Blockchains into a Web of Composable Attested Data Structures for Cross-Domain Applications [PDF] [Slides] [Code]
  Isaac Sheff, Xinwen Wang, Kushal Babel, Haobin Ni, Robbert van Renesse, Andrew Myers
  ACM TOCS 2023


• Shortstack: Distributed, Fault-tolerant, Oblivious Data Access [PDF] [Code] [Slides] [OSDI Talk]
  Midhul Vuppalapati*, Kushal Babel*, Anurag Khandelwal, Rachit Agarwal
  USENIX OSDI 2022


• Strategic Peer Selection Using Transaction Value and Latency [PDF] [Slides] [Talk]
  Kushal Babel, Lucas Baker
  Workshop On DeFi and Security @ ACM CCS 2022


• On the semantics of communications when verifying equivalence properties [PDF]
  Kushal Babel, Vincent Cheval, Steve Kremer
  Journal of Computer Security 2020


• On Communication Models When Verifying Equivalence Properties [PDF]
  Kushal Babel, Vincent Cheval, Steve Kremer
  POST (ETAPS) 2017 Best paper award nomination

(* equal contribution)

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Other Manuscripts

• An Exploration of Storage Pricing and Gas Accounting Designs for EVM Blockchains [PDF]
  Kushal Babel, Yacine Dolivet, Michael Setrin
  Category Labs, 2026


• Monad Initial Specification Proposal [PDF]
  Category Labs, 2025


• Time-Lock Encrypted Storage for Blockchains [PDF]
  Amit Agarwal, Kushal Babel, Sourav Das, Babak Poorebrahim Gilkalaye
  IACR ePrint, 2025


• The Sting Framework: Proving the Existence of Superclass Adversaries [PDF]
  Mahimna Kelkar, Yunqi Li, Nerla Jean-Louis, Carolina Ortega Pérez, Kushal Babel, Andrew Miller, Ari Juels
  IACR ePrint, 2024


• DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs [PDF] [Code]
  James Austgen*, Andrés Fábrega*, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel, Mahimna Kelkar, Ari Juels
  ArXiv Preprint, 2023. Superseded by Voting-Bloc Entropy and Liquefaction.

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Blog Posts

• Finding bugs that frontier models miss. June'26
• Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains. April'26
• MonadBFT Update: Fast Recovery & Leader Fault Isolation. Nov'25
• MonadBFT: Fast, Responsive, Fork-Resistant, Streamlined Consensus. April'25
• The Sting Framework (SF). June'23
• PROF: Fair Transaction-Ordering in a Profit-Seeking World. April'23
• Complete Knowledge. Jan'23

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Invited Talks

• PROF: Protected Order Flow for Fair Transaction-Ordering in a Profit-Seeking World
  • IEEE EuroS&P (Lisbon) : March'26
  • [Video] Science of Blockchain Conference (NYC) : Aug'24
  • UCSB-Econ DeFi Seminar : Sept'24
  • [Video] MEV Day @ SBC (Palo Alto, CA) : Aug'23
• Mysticeti: Low-Latency DAG Consensus with Fast Commit Path
  • Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras : Mar'24
  • [Video] Avalanche Labs Systems Seminar : Feb'24
  • IC3 Retreat (Les Diablerets) : Jan'24
• Lanturn: Measuring Economic Security of Smart Contracts Through Adaptive Learning
  • [Video] Avalanche Labs Systems Seminar : Dec'23
  • ACM CCS (Copenhagen): Nov'23
  • [Slides] [Video] Science of Blockchain Conference (Palo Alto, CA) : Aug'23
  • IC3 Retreat (Les Diablerets) : Jan'23
• Clockwork Finance: Automated Analysis of Economic Security in Smart Contracts
  • [Video] IEEE S&P (San Francisco, CA) : May'23
  • [Slides] [Video] Science of Blockchain Conference (Palo Alto, CA) : Aug'22
• Shortstack: Distributed, Fault-tolerant, Oblivious Data Access
  • [Slides] [Video] USENIX OSDI (Carlsbad, CA) : July'22
• Charlotte: A Web of Composable Authenticated Distributed Data Structures
  • Ripple University Blockchain Research Initiative (Remote) : Oct'20 [Video]

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Experience

• 2024 - present - Researcher, Category Labs
• Summer'23 - Research Intern, Mysten Labs - Systems Team, hosted by George Danezis
• Summer'22 - Research Intern, Jump Crypto
• 2018-19 - HFT Quantitative Researcher and low-latency C++ Engineer, AlphaGrep Securities
• Summer'17 - SWE Intern, Uber India
• Summer'16 - Research Intern, INRIA Nancy - Formal Methods Team, hosted by Steve Kremer

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Academic Service

Program Committee:

• ACM CCS 2026
• DeFi and Security Workshop @ ACM CCS 2025
• DeFi and Security Workshop @ ACM CCS 2024
• DeFi Workshop @ FC 2023
• DeFi and Security Workshop @ ACM CCS 2022

Journal Reviewer:

• IEEE Transactions on Services Computing

External Reviewer:

• ACM SIGMETRICS 2024
• SBC 2023
• ACM CCS 2020

I co-organized the Cornell Security Seminar in 2021-22 with Armin.

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Selected Awards

• Silver Medal, 9^th International Junior Science Olympiad, Tehran
• Bronze Medal, 46^th International Chemistry Olympiad, Hanoi
• KVPY fellowship

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Teaching

I enjoy teaching! I've served as a Teaching Assistant for several courses:

• Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies, Cornell Tech - Spring'22
• Introduction to Compilers, Cornell University - Spring'20
• Object-Oriented Design and Data Structures, Cornell University - Fall'19
• Operating Systems, IIT Bombay - Fall'17
• Digial Logic Design, IIT Bombay - Spring'17
• Computer Programming & Utilization, IIT Bombay - Fall'16
• Programming Abstractions, IIT Bombay - Spring'16
• Quantum Physics, IIT Bombay - Fall'15

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Many thanks to Midhul for the site inspiration.