I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, University of Oxford. I obtained my Ph.D. in Mathematics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2023, with a thesis on the microstructure of traditional electronic markets and decentralised exchanges.

Prior to my doctoral studies, I spent four years in the hedge fund industry working on systematic trading and global macro research.

Outside academia, I am passionate about climbing, mountaineering, and languages.

Research interests

Blockchain technology, asset digitisation, and machine learning are reshaping the financial landscape and challenging traditional stakeholders. My research focuses on two strands:

• Economics of blockchains and decentralised financial systems — microstructure of decentralised markets, incentive design in blockchain economies, and tokenisation.
• Machine learning for financial decision problems — reinforcement learning and statistical inference.

Selected papers

A complete list is available on the publications page.

1. Capponi, A., Cartea, Á., Drissi, F. (2025). The Viability of Blockchain Markets under Discrete Clearing and Paid Priority. link
   Presented at / Accepted at:

   • NBER Summer Institute 2026, Financial Market Structure, Cambridge, MA
   • 6th Annual CBER Conference, New York, 2026
   • 41st Meeting of the European Economic Association and the 77th European Meeting of the Econometric Society (EEA-ESEM 2026)
2. Drissi, F., Feinstein, Z., Williams, B. (2026). Liquid Staking and the Limits of Policy. link
   Presented at / Accepted at:

   • CBER Crafting the Cryptoeconomy Conference, Columbia University, 2025
   • Designing DeFi Conference, Columbia Business School, New York, 2026

Grants and awards

• 2025 — Research Grant, Uniswap. Fixed-for-Floating Fee Swap in Decentralised Finance.
• 2023 — Best PhD Thesis Prize, EURO Working Group for Commodities and Financial Modelling (EWGCFM). Decentralised Finance, Execution and Speculation.
• 2023 — PhD Research Grant, G-Research. Unsupervised Learning for Algorithmic Trading.
• 2022 — Research Grant, Chaire Fintech Université Paris Dauphine‑PSL. Decentralised Finance and Automated Market Making: Predictable Loss and Optimal Liquidity Provision.

Service and editorial activity

• Topic editor, Journal of FinTech.
• Referee for Management Science, Operations Research, Annals of Operations Research, Mathematical Finance, and Finance & Stochastics.

Events I organise

• 2026 — OMI–SBS Conference on FinTech and Blockchain Economics.
• 2023 – present — OMI Finance Seminar.
• 2025 — INFORMS Session on Blockchain Economics and Decentralised Finance.
• 2025 — SIAM Minisymposium on Decentralised Finance and Market Microstructure.
• 2025 — Workshop on Decentralised Finance and Market Microstructure, Fields Institute.
• 2025 — Oxford–Harvard Conference on Decentralised Finance and Market Microstructure.
• 2023 — Financial Technology Conference, University of Oxford.
• 2023 — Blockchain@X–OMI Workshop on Blockchain and Decentralised Finance, Ecole Polytechnique & University of Oxford.

Contact

faycal (dot) drissi (at) gmail (dot) com
Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, Eagle House, OX2 6ED, Oxford.