Duc V. Le [cv]

Duc V. Le

Staff Research Engineer, Circle

levduc112[at]gmail.com curriculum vitae 21 publications

Portrait of Duc V. Le

Applied Cryptography, Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, Distributed Systems Security

About

I am currently a staff research engineer at Circle. Previously, I was a staff research scientist at Visa Research.

I was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Bern, working with Professor Christian Cachin.

I hold a PhD from Purdue University. I was advised by Professor Aniket Kate and Professor Mikhail Atallah

Research

Publications by area

Grouped by topic rather than date. Whitepapers and preprints are marked as such; everything else is peer reviewed.

Off-chain scalability & payment channels 4

Moving blockchain applications off-chain while keeping their on-chain guarantees, so the chain is paid for only when something goes wrong.

2026

Scalable Off-Chain Auctions

NDSS [paper] [interactive]

Mohsen Minaei, Ranjit Kumaresan, Andrew Beams, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Yibin Yang, Srinivasan Raghuraman, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Mahdi Zamani, Duc V. Le

2026
2025

AUPCH: Auditable Unlinkable Payment Channel Hubs

CBT [paper]

Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Mohsen Minaei, Srinivasan Raghuraman, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Duc V. Le

2024

Programmable Payment Channels

ACNS [paper]

Yibin Yang, Mohsen Minaei, Srinivasan Raghuraman, Ranjit Kumaresan, Duc V. Le, Mahdi Zamani

Privacy-enhancing technologies 6

Unlinkability and confidentiality for blockchain transactions, and the models needed to reason about what they actually hide.

2025

DTL: Data Tumbling Layer - A Composable Unlinkability Primitive for Smart Contracts

AsiaCCS [paper]

Mohsen Minaei, Pedro Moreno Sanchez, Zhiyong Fang, Srinivasan Raghuraman, Navid Alamati, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Ranjit Kumaresan, Duc V. Le

2024

A Transaction-Level Model for Blockchain Privacy

FC [paper]

François-Xavier Wicht, Zhipeng Wang, Duc V. Le, Christian Cachin

2023

Pay Less for Your Privacy: Towards Cost-Effective On-Chain Mixers

AFT [paper]

Zhipeng Wang, Marko Cirkovic, Duc V. Le, William Knottenbelt, Christian Cachin

2021
2020

T3: Scaling Oblivious Accesses to Large-Scale Blockchain

PETS [paper] [code]

Duc V. Le, Lizzy Tengana Hurtado, Adil Ahmad, Mohsen Minaei, Byoungyoung Lee, Aniket Kate

2020

DLSAG: Dual Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group Signatures

Financial Crypto [paper] [code]

Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Arthur Blue, Duc V. Le, Sarang Noether, Brandon Goodell, Aniket Kate

Consensus, MEV & incentives 5

Security and incentive analysis of permissionless consensus, transaction ordering, and on-chain markets.

2026

Concave is the New Linear: The Impossibility of Anti-Plutocratic DAO Governance

arXiv preprint [paper]

Austin Bennett, Preston Vander Vos, Duc V. Le, Mira Belenkiy

2025

BlindPerm: Efficient MEV Mitigation with an Encrypted Mempool and Permutation

OPODIS [paper]

Alireza Kavousi, Duc V. Le, Philipp Jovanovic, George Danezis

2024

A Plug-and-Play Long-Range Defense System for Proof-of-Stake Blockchains

ESORICS [paper]

Lucien K.L. Ng, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Duc V. Le, Mohsen Minaei, Ranjit Kumaresan, Mahdi Zamani

2022

Modeling Resources in Permissionless Longest-chain Total-order Broadcast

OPODIS [paper]

Sarah Azouvi, Christian Cachin, Duc V. Le, Marko Vukolic, Luca Zanolini

2021

High-Frequency Trading on Decentralized On-Chain Exchanges

S&P Oakland [paper]

Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Christof Ferreira Torres, Duc V. Le, Arthur Gervais

Applied cryptography 6

Signature schemes, trusted-setup ceremonies, post-quantum migration, and how cryptography is used — and misused — in practice.

2026

Preparing for the Quantum Era: Assessing Quantum Computing Risks to Blockchain Security

Visa Whitepaper whitepaper [paper]

Duc V. Le, Panos Chatzigiannis, Navid Alamati, Sunpreet Singh Arora, Anderson Nascimento, Timothy Conard, Noah Levine, Adam Clark, Cuy Sheffield

2026

Circle's Post-Quantum Security Roadmap: Securing Blockchains, Smart Contracts, and Digital Assets for the Quantum Era

Circle Whitepaper whitepaper [paper]

Mira Belenkiy, Duc V. Le, Gordon Liao, Vipin Singh Sehrawat, Dragos Rotaru, Sergey Gorbunov, Milap Sheth, Jay Logelin, Anthony De Abreu, Dan Boneh

2025

Lite-PoT: Practical Powers-of-Tau Setup Ceremony

CCS [paper] [interactive]

Lucien K. L. Ng, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Mohsen Minaei, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Adithya Bhat, Duc V. Le

2025

DSKE: Digital Signatures with Key Extraction

CT-RSA [paper]

Zhipeng Wang, Orestis Alpos, Alireza Kavousi, Harry W. H. Wong, Sze Yiu Chau, Duc V. Le, Christian Cachin

2024

Towards Precise Reporting of Cryptographic Misuses

NDSS [paper]

Yikang Chen, Yibo Liu, Ka Lok Wu, Duc V. Le, Sze Yiu Chau

2019

Flexible Digital Signatures

ESORICS [paper]

Duc V. Le, Mahimna Kelkar, Aniket Kate

Mentoring

Students I have worked with

  • Lucien K. L. Ng Power of Tau ceremony optimization (CCS '25); Long-Range Defense for PoS Blockchains (ESORICS '24)

  • François-Xavier Wicht (Master Student) Blockchain Privacy Notions Using the Transaction Graph Model (FC '24)

  • Marko Cirkovic (Bachelor Student) Cost-Effective Onchain Mixers (AFT '23)

  • Lizzy Tengana Hurtado Oblivious Database for Blockchain Clients (PETS '20)

Talks

Selected talks

  • 2025

    CT-RSA 2025: Digital Signature with Key Extraction

  • 2023

    IC3 Winter Retreat 2023: Modelling Resources in Permissionless Longest-chain Total-order Broadcast

  • 2022

    OPODIS 2022: Modelling Resources in Permissionless Longest-chain Total-order Broadcast

  • 2019

    Bitcoin 2019 (Scaling Bitcoin): T3: Scaling Oblivious Accesses to Large-scale blockchain; ESORICS 2019: Flexible Digital Signature

Service

Programme committees and reviewing

  • 2025

    S&P (PC), CCS (PC), PETS (PC), ACNS (PC), AsiaCCS (PC)

  • 2024

    FC (PC), PETS (PC), CCS (PC)

  • 2023

    CCS (PC), FC (PC), NDSS (Student Support Committee), ConsensusDay (PC), SACMAT (PC), PETS (External Reviewer), SBC (External Reviewer)

  • 2022

    ACM TOPS (Reviewer), IEEE TDSC (Reviewer), ConsensusDay (PC), SACMAT (PC), S&P (Poster Jury)

  • 2021

    IEEE S&B (PC), EuroS&P (External Reviewer), CCS (Poster Jury)

Teaching

Teaching assistantships

  • Purdue University (Teaching Assistant)CS182 (Discrete Math), CS381 (Algorithms and Data Structures), CS555 (Cryptography), CS528 (Network Security)