Shai Kritz

I build measurement and risk frameworks for systems nobody controls — first in decentralised finance, now in enterprise AI.

Publications

  1. Stress Testing Ethena: A Quantitative Look at Protocol Stability
    July 2025 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Barry Fried, Flavio Benatti, Murathan BaÄŸdat
    Scenario-based stress testing of a synthetic dollar's hedging structure — how far funding, collateral and redemption conditions can move before stability stops holding.
  2. Staking Penalties on Ethereum's Consensus Layer: Implications for wstETH and Other LSTs and LRTs
    April 2025 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Barry Fried, Murathan BaÄŸdat
    How penalties applied at the base layer of a network propagate into the derivative assets built on top of it, and what that means for anyone holding those assets as collateral.
  3. Principal Token Risk Assessment Framework
    January 2025 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Craig Le Riche, Andre M. Rodrigues
    A reusable framework for assessing instruments whose risk profile changes across their lifecycle, built to be applied to new assets rather than to a single one.
  4. Pendle v2 Mechanism Design Risk Assessment
    January 2025 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Craig Le Riche, Andre M. Rodrigues
    A mechanism design review of a yield tokenisation protocol, examining how its instruments behave through the maturity cycle and where the design concentrates risk.
  5. Liquity V2 Mechanism Design Review
    October 2024 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Barry Fried, Yonatan Haimowitz
    Reviewing an incentive mechanism on its own terms: where a system that depends on rational participants stops behaving the way it was designed to.
  6. Ostium Risk Report
    September 2024 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Or Simko, Andre Rodrigues
    A risk assessment of a venue offering exposure to real-world assets on-chain, including the specific complications of trading assets whose underlying markets close.
  7. Avantis Finance Genesis Parameter Recommendations
    December 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Franziska Wehrmann, Barry Fried
    Deriving launch parameters — leverage limits, exposure caps, fee structure — from simulated conditions, balancing capital efficiency against solvency protection.
  8. LST Market Risks on Ethena
    November 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Craig Le Riche
    An assessment of the market risks introduced when assets with their own liquidity constraints are accepted as collateral inside a protocol that hedges elsewhere.
  9. USDV Risk and Economic Security Assessment
    November 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg
    An economic security assessment of a multi-issuer, cross-chain stablecoin, and the attack surface created by distributing issuance across parties.
  10. Nexus Mutual V2 Mechanism Design Audit and Recommendations
    November 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Franziska Wehrmann
    A design audit of a decentralised insurance protocol, aligning capital efficiency against the requirement that a mutual must actually be able to pay claims.
  11. On Chain Stablecoin Liquidity Report
    October 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Craig Le Riche
    An empirical study of how much size the market can absorb before prices move materially, and what that implies for protocols assuming exit liquidity exists.
  12. Perpetual Futures Liquidity Assessment Report
    October 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Craig Le Riche
    Measuring the capacity of derivative venues to absorb flow, and what the observed conditions imply for forced liquidation under stress.
  13. Uniswap V3 LP Simulation Platform: A Case Study
    July 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg
    Simulating a strategy before capital is committed: modelling how range selection, fee income and divergence loss interact to determine realised returns.
  14. GMX V2 Genesis Risk Framework and Methodology
    July 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Yonatan Haimowitz
    Setting launch parameters for a system with no operating history — the reasoning that produces the numbers, not just the numbers.
  15. dYdX V3 Risk Parameter Recommendations Platform: Methodology Exploration
    May 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg
    Framing parameter setting as a repeatable analytical process rather than a judgement call: margin requirements, liquidation thresholds and position limits, each derived from observed behaviour.
  16. Interest Rates Optimization Framework Exploration
    April 2023 · Chaos Labs · with Omer Goldberg, Yonatan Haimowitz
    How rate curves can be optimised against market conditions rather than set by convention — examining the relationship between utilisation, demand and return across curve shapes.

About

For the past four years I have led research at Chaos Labs, the category leader in decentralised finance risk. The work below is the output: frameworks for setting parameters on systems with no operating history, stress tests of protocols whose failure modes had never been observed, and methodologies built to be applied again rather than once.

The through-line is a single problem. You are handed a system you do not control, operated by participants whose incentives you cannot dictate, and asked to say how far it can be pushed before it stops behaving as designed. Answering that requires measurement you can defend, bounds you can justify, and the discipline to state what the model does not cover.

That problem is not specific to finance. Autonomous systems inside enterprises pose it in the same shape: observe behaviour you did not specify, attribute value, set guardrails, and prove the system stayed inside its mandate. It is the same work on a different substrate, and it is what I am doing now.