Christian Catalini

Tech founder with roots in academia.
Founded the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab.
Co-founded Lightspark. Co-created Libra.

Christian Catalini is the Founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab and a Research Scientist at MIT. He is also a Co-Founder of Lightspark, where he served as Chief Strategy Officer and oversaw the finance, data science, business development, corporate development, and strategic partnerships teams. Christian is also a contributor at Forbes, where he writes on the economic and strategic implications of AI, digital assets, and financial infrastructure.

Previously, he was a co-creator of Diem (formerly Libra), Chief Economist of the Diem Association, and Head Economist of Meta's FinTech division. While a Professor at MIT, he designed the MIT Digital Currency Research Study which gave access to Bitcoin to every MIT undergraduate in 2014.

Through his work on Libra and Diem, Christian engaged extensively with regulators around the world, including the Federal Reserve Board, U.S. Treasury, SEC, OCC, CFTC, ECB, Bank of England, FINMA, BaFin, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. In 2023, he was appointed to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Technology Advisory Committee, and from 2021 to 2023 he served on the Bank of England's CBDC Engagement Forum. He is also an advisor to Coinbase, Skyfire, and the Better Money Company, and an independent board member at Hivemind Capital.

Christian's academic research at MIT focuses on the economics of AI and AGI, digital assets, stablecoins, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. His earlier work examined the economics of equity crowdfunding and startup growth, as well as the economics of scientific collaboration. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and an MSc (summa cum laude) in Economics and Management of New Technologies from Bocconi University in Milan. In 2018, he was appointed a Faculty Research Fellow in the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

His research has been featured in Nature, Science, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, WIRED, NPR, Forbes, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, the Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, VICE News, and The Washington Post, among others. He has presented his work at Harvard, MIT, Yale, London Business School, NYU, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, as well as at the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, the SEC, the CFTC, the World Bank, the IMF, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and numerous central banks and regulatory bodies.