professor @Columbia_Biz / research @paradigm @uniswap / stochastic control, quantitative finance, market microstructure, blockchain
new york city
Joined February 2009
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The gaslighting here is astonishing. Acting President @ClaireShipman should speak for herself. As a @Columbia faculty member I do not share her values of authoritarian university governance and enforcement of ideological conformity, all to advance a racist Trump admin agenda.
Acting University President Claire Shipman, CC ’86, SIPA ’94, described Columbia’s Wednesday agreement with President Donald Trump’s administration to pay $220 million to restore funding as “in line with our values” in her first interview with Spectator.
l8r.it/agLK
ciamac moallemi retweeted
"if you want to auto-delever in a way that's going to minimize your future risk of equity shortfalls, then you have to focus on the accounts that are closest to insolvency, and that is going to be the most highly leveraged accounts."
@ciamac from @columbia_biz explores the optimal way to ADL on perps exchanges.
ciamac moallemi retweeted
Auto-deleveraging is essential, and the industry standard may be broken.
@ciamac of @Columbia_Biz uses Hyperliquid’s data from October 10 to show how current ADL rules can be gamed and proposes a model with nearly 3x the risk reduction.
1:27 Why traders hate ADL
2:07 October 10 took $2B on Hyperliquid
3:16 Every exchange copy-pasted BitMEX's rule
3:37 How to game the current system
5:07 Why leverage is the right ADL priority
8:23 How leverage-based ADL can't be gamed
10:01 October 10 with 3x the protection
Really? Let’s form a committee? Needless bureaucracy is an unfortunately a @Columbia tradition. A disappointing start for the new president.
An important update regarding campus access from President Jennifer L. Mnookin: president.columbia.edu/news/…
ALT Aerial view of the Columbia University campus, featuring the iconic Low Memorial Library with its grand dome and steps, surrounded by university buildings and green spaces.
Thank you @ZohranKMamdani!
New: Mamdani’s admin is officially coming out in favor of restoring public access to Columbia University’s main campus, reversing his predecessor’s support for keeping it closed due to safety concerns over pro-Palestinian protests.
w/ @madinatoure politico.com/news/2026/09/04…
We're not stuck, you just haven't looked. Nobody has produced evidence of "risk of violence" — not Columbia, not its lawyers, not in any published data, not in three years. You've mistaken your own feelings for a security assessment, and the neighborhood is walking six blocks around it. You're also not speaking for campus. In the Senate's own poll, "very comfortable reopening" beat "very uncomfortable" 62 to 5.
This post, like much of the discourse around the pied-a-terre tax, is riddled with inaccuracy and demonstrates astonishing ignorance. For starters, the tax for condos is based on the DOF market value, which is a fraction of the market value.
If you really believe this logic, NYC condo prices should have collapsed. But they haven't. So the market doesn't believe this nonsense.
Some math regarding the pied-a-terre tax.
If I own a $5 million condo, the tax is 6.5% - every year, forever. That's $325,000.
Prospective buyers understand this, and they 're not stupid. They price it in.
They calculate, or "capitalize," the obligations, determining the present value of all that debt.
The numbers are devastating. Using a discount rate (or "cap rate") of 6% means you knock $5.4 million off the value of the property...
...meaning you wouldn't even take the property if it was given to you for free...
...meaning the value of the condo has been reduced to less than zero from $5 million.
You've been Zohran'd.
So, a fair question to ask is, "If my $5 million condo is now worth zero, am I now exempt from the tax? And does my exemption drive the value back to $5 million, so now I'm getting taxed again?"
Does anyone understand how insane this is?
ciamac moallemi retweeted
More #hyperliquid from CBER @NYUStern
@ciamac @Columbia_Biz explains auto-deleveraging and offers an alternative. Donghwa Shin @kenanflagler provides comments:
Nice work by @Qiaoqiao2001!
I solved 6 open Erdős problems in 5 days, using @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol.
I have a math background, but the Codex workflow I used does not require deep mathematical knowledge.
Here’s exactly how I approached it, including my prompts 🧵
new paper w/ @malleshpai @Weiye_Xi @Qiaoqiao2001
a principled approach to quantifying uncertainty in prediction markets 👇
🚨New Paper with @Weiye_Xi , @ciamac and @Qiaoqiao2001
Here’s two different prediction markets priced at ~6.5%:
1. Will the US confirm the existence of Aliens in 2026?
2. *that* Spurs @ Knicks Game 4, ~4th quarter.
They suggest that both these events are the same probability, but intuitively these feel very different: the latter (Knicks won!) feels a lot more uncertain. But prediction markets don’t immediately give us a way to quantify it.
ciamac moallemi retweeted
Under stress, derivatives protocols have to make hard decisions in real time:
→ How options decay
→ How leverage is reduced
→ How ADL is triggered
→ How losses are allocated
→ How solvency is restored
Full recap of the Perpetual Futures & Derivatives track at D²: substack.com/home/post/p-203…
ciamac moallemi retweeted
I am sad to hear of the passing of Dimitri Bertsekas. This one hurts.
Dimitri had a big effect on my career, from inspiring research topics to writing one of my tenure letters.
A long thread on memories of Bertsekas and some of his works that influenced me the most.
ciamac moallemi retweeted
D² brings together research on DeFi protocol design, incentives, and market behavior
Across two days, the program spans:
→ DeFi Microstructure
→ Perpetual Futures & Derivatives
→ Mechanism Design
→ Prediction Markets
→ AMMs
Learn more: designingdefi.xyz
The leadership at @Columbia seek to discipline a student for ... criticizing the trustees. So much for academic freedom and open discourse. The fish rots from the head down.
Having cut a horrible deal with Trump giving him oversight of the university, @Columbia may be the worst campus in the United States for free speech, especially about Israel. It is threatening to discipline a student for distributing this legitimate flyer. trib.al/quwTJcC
ciamac moallemi retweeted
Sharif is the #1 university in Iran. Over the last 25 years, it has been in the top 3 destinations of top Olympiad medalists.
What do the smartest kids in the world do when they grow up?
I did the largest study of ~18,000 International Olympiad medalists (IMO, IOI and IPhO) over the last 25yrs, arguably the sharpest analytical minds of the world in high school, to see where they ended up and traced ~50% of them.
Founders of ~20 unicorns and ~7 decacorns and ~10 billionaires: OpenAI, Cursor, Stripe, Databricks, Perplexity, Ethereum, Cognition, Hyperliquid, Fireworks, Modal, Quora, Parallel, Cartesia, Wispr
Most kids went to MIT, a whopping 12% of them, followed by Cambridge (7%) and Sharif (3%)!
The career paths they chose (of those who graduated) were:
— 36% Academia (professors)
— 26% Other
— 22% in Software / Tech
— 12% in Quant / Finance
— 5% Founders!
The biggest employer was Google, by far, at 6%.
Others interesting tidbits were:
— 47 of them work at Jane Street (#3)
— 38 at OpenAI (#5)
— 15 at Anthropic
— 8 at Cognition
— 6 at Isomorphic Labs
Olympiaders were 1500x more likely to be billionaires and 4000x more likely to be unicorn founders than the average person!
Ken Griffin pays only 0.22% of the market value of his $240M condo in property tax, whereas condos in the lowest 10th percentile (<$350K) pay almost 1.4%.
Exclusive: Billionaire Ken Griffin is appalled that Mayor Zohran Mamdani used his 24,000-square-foot Manhattan penthouse last week as the backdrop for a tax-the-rich video, and that has triggered a subtle threat of re-evaluating investment in the city. on.wsj.com/495DhvH
ciamac moallemi retweeted
How do onchain markets actually work?
D²’s DeFi Microstructure track covers the mechanics behind latency, fees, staking, and block building:
→ Latency races on blockchains: Brian Zhu
→ Fee mechanisms under execution uncertainty: Sarisht Wadhwa
→ Liquid staking and policy limits: Fayçal Drissi
→ EVM workloads in the wild: Jason Milionis
→ Ethereum block-building resilience: Sen Yang
