Fahad Saleh co-created the CBER Forum and CtCe initiative to bridge the gap between academic research and the ever-evolving crypto industry, with the ultimate goal of establishing coherent knowledge that can influence policy and drive innovation.

What got you interested in crypto in the first place?
The DAO hack sparked my interest. I was doing a PhD in finance when a faculty member invited crypto lawyer Drew Hinkes to give a talk about it. I found the talk fascinating but only understood about 20% of what Drew said. After the fact, I wanted to understand the topic better, so I started reading "Mastering Bitcoin" by Andreas Antonopoulos.

As I started reading, I realized that a lot of the tools relevant to understanding blockchain were actually part of the training in applied math, and, luckily, that had been my background prior to starting my PhD. Moreover, as I began to understand more, my interest in crypto expanded well beyond the DAO hack to fundamental questions such as whether permissionless blockchains could compete with settlement systems in traditional finance.

Ultimately, I decided these questions were worth studying formally and so I pursued economic analysis of permissionless blockchains as the topic of my PhD dissertation. Years later, I am further down the crypto rabbit hole than ever with no intention of ever emerging. Almost all of my work is on cryptoeconomics, and I teach two cryptoeconomics classes, one at the University of Florida and one at MIT.

What makes crypto research different from traditional economic or financial research?
The core insights in traditional economics and finance research were put forth long ago. As a consequence, current research in traditional areas is generally incremental with limited practical significance.

Crypto is different because:

1. It's new

2. It's constantly evolving

3. It has potentially transformative implications for the broader economy

A few examples come to mind: Uniswap is only about 5 years old but had a transformative impact on crypto and has the potential to have a transformative impact with regard to liquidity provision mechanisms more generally. Similarly, restaking wasn't prominent two years ago but has now taken off. As crypto becomes more mainstream and integrated with traditional finance, there's a growing need to understand it and thereby plenty of opportunities for crypto researchers to have real-world impact.

What gaps are there in the research community that CBER forum and the CtCe initiative aim to address?
The “gap” isn't something missed in past research - it's about keeping up with a moving target. If academics don't regularly refresh their crypto knowledge, then the gaps continue to open up. CBER Forum started as a webinar series during the pandemic with about 10 academics hosting seminars virtually. Even after pandemic restrictions ended, we continued because the crypto space moves so fast and the webinars were helping to keep academics up to date. Now, CBER Forum has expanded beyond webinars to include in-person events and conferences, a PhD summer school, and Research proposal grants.

The CtCe (Crafting the Crypto Economy) initiative, funded by the Uniswap Foundation, is a more purposeful extension of this concept: while CBER Forum broadly aims to keep academics informed, CtCe specifically works toward making sure practitioners understand what's going on in academia, and academics understand what's going on in the real world. CtCe has two main functions that work hand in hand:

• Education - Hosting conferences to get academics up to speed on industry developments

• Research promotion - Rewarding good research and disseminating it to create consensus

These functions are deeply interconnected - it's one thing to produce high-quality research, but without effective education and promotion, we can't establish a baseline of knowledge in the industry. The annual CtCe conference in October demonstrates this approach by educating academics who may not have regular exposure to the industry, while simultaneously showcasing funded research. 2025’s conference will put this into practice as last year's grantees present their findings to both academics and industry participants, creating a cycle of research, education, and implementation.

What advice do you have for researchers seeking grant funding and organizations interested in engaging with the academic community?

For researchers:

1. Understand how your work relates to what others are already doing

2. Try to build a cohesive literature, especially across disciplines

3. If you disagree with existing understanding, clarify why; if you agree, extend it

4. Bridge divides across disciplines - computer scientists, economists, and others often study similar problems but don't read each other's work

There's also a divide between industry and academia. Even when people know each other, they don't read each other's work. It's important to understand why others think the way they do - sometimes what seems silly actually has a good point that wasn't communicated well.

For organizations engaging with academia:

1. Highlight the practical questions that need to be answered and why these are important

2. Get people from different disciplines in the same room talking to each other to solve these questions

3. Foster an environment driven by developing a unified practically insightful understanding that crosses disciplines

How do you see the CtCe initiative evolving over the next few years? What impact do you envision it having?
I would like the results from the proposals we fund through CtCe to become references for people in policy circles. We would need to translate the rigor of these studies into a higher-level summary digestible to policy-makers, but developing such high-level summaries of crypto research is crucial because there are more people outside the crypto community than inside it. Crypto has value for the broader world, but the value can be unlocked only through effective communication outside the community. Our approved proposals deal with important topics that have policy relevance, and I am hoping that we can report the findings of these proposals in a way that is useful for policymakers so that the research can then have real-world impact.

Additionally, to better bridge between academics and industry, we need to ensure academics are familiar with the latest crypto-relevant data. CBER Forum runs a summer school for researchers, but we haven't shown our attendees how to use crypto data sources effectively. Hands-on experience with data from platforms like Allium or Dune can discipline a researcher’s theoretical understanding and this discipline is crucial if we want academic work to be relevant to industry.