Andreas Veneris

Andreas Veneris is a Connaught Scholar and Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, cross-appointed with the Department of Computer Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In the past, he held joint faculty positions with the Athens University of Economics and Business (Dept. of Informatics, 2006-16) and with the University of Tokyo (Dept. of ECE, 2010-11). For more than 20 years he worked in the field of CAD for VLSI synthesis, verification and debugging using formal methods where he published more than 120 conference/journal papers. Today, he focuses on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), mechanism/economic design of distributed systems, formal methods for smart contract verification, and techno-legal blockchain policy/regulatory questions. He has received a 10-year Best Paper Retrospective Award, five other best paper awards and holds three patents. He was a member of the team in the first webcast ever (37th Grammy Awards, 1995), an event acknowledged by the American Congress. In February 2021 his work with the Bank of Canada became public, proposing Canada's Central Bank Digital Loonie –the first work of its kind that presented a comprehensive technological, regulatory/legal and economic model for a central bank digital currency. In 2021 he was honored to be acknowledged for his contributions on a classified report by the Hoover Institution, prefaced by former United States Secretary of the State Condoleezza Rice and co-authored by an extensive list of prominent world-thinkers. This report was released on March 1, 2022 titled as ``Digital Currencies: The US, China, And The World At A Crossroads''. A week later US President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order following most of the recommendations of this report. He engages with many G20 Central Banks on the topic of CBDCs and Web 3.0, and his work has been featured in publications by the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, among other.