Wanyi Dai Li 戴李婉嫕

About Me

• I design incentive systems and ship them. My work sits at the intersection of mechanism design, economics, and product — from writing the theory to owning the launch. Currently, I lead the Special Mechanisms Group (SMG) and the Infura product group at Consensys, where I own Consensys's MEV strategy on Ethereum.
• My career spans the full arc from academic economist to operator: I have designed staking mechanisms at Chainlink, built cryptoeconomic strategy at Meta, shipped R&D products at Lightspark, and built optimization programs for carbon credit markets. I thrive on problems where economic theory meets real-world execution at scale.
• I hold a PhD from Stanford University's Management Science & Engineering department, where I was trained in operations research and mechanism design. My dissertation, co-advised by Itai Ashlagi and Irene Lo, focused on optimal contract design for environmental sustainability.
• Outside work, I enjoy partner dancing (tango, fusion, west coast swing), jiu-jitsu, pottery, sewing, and spending time in nature. I also DJ at fusion partner dance socials.

Timeline

• 2021 – Present
  Boston, MA → San Francisco, CA
• 2016 – 2021
  Stanford University, CA — PhD, Management Science & Engineering

  Defended dissertation in April 2021. Thesis committee: Itai Ashlagi, Irene Lo, John Weyant, Ramesh Johari, Alex Teytelboym, and Jim Leape.

• 2012 – 2016
  Wellesley College, MA — BA, Physics (major); Computer Science (minor), magna cum laude
• 2010 – 2012
  United World College (UWC) Mahindra College, Pune, India
• 2008 – 2010
  Suzhou High School, Suzhou, China
• Before 2008
  Xuzhou (徐州), China

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