About us
Love talking about papers? So do we!
Do you have a paper within the realm of computing that excites you — recent or classic — and want to share it with others? Or would you enjoy hearing accessible, enthusiastic explanations of important research?
Whether you have implemented the ideas, used them in a project, or simply want to learn and discuss, this is a welcoming, inclusive space for presenters and listeners alike: we celebrate diverse perspectives, encourage practical demos and honest struggles. Everyone — students, researchers, engineers and curious minds — is invited.
Logistics — we meet monthly in Zürich, usually on a Thursday, 18:15–20:00; RSVP on Meetup.
Subjects — papers live within the broad realms of computing and computer science, kept intentionally open-ended.
Audience — ideal for anyone who wants accessible explanations of complex computer-science papers, where the maths is typically simplified.
Culture — inclusive, respectful and welcoming to diverse perspectives.
Presentation format — talks are typically 45–60 minutes, followed by discussion, Q&A and networking.
We are curating this repository for papers presented at PWL Zürich. You can contribute by adding Pull Requests for papers, code, and/or links to our repository here. We keep a list of papers that we would like to talk about. Slides of all our previous talks will be made available (if available) on our website.
We follow the Papers We Love Code of Conduct.
More details can be found on the event page.
Upcoming events
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Gaming Ethereum: How Trading Bots Cut the Line and Threaten Consensus
ETH Zurich / Zentrum / CAB G 52, Universitätstrasse 6, Zürich, CHIn our upcoming session, Simran Tinani, Security Engineer at Digital Asset, will present "Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges".
In traditional markets, high-frequency traders profit by being physically faster than everyone else, racing orders across fragmented exchanges within microseconds, a practice called frontrunning. Decentralized finance collapses those venues into a single state machine like Ethereum, where every pending transaction sits in a public mempool for anyone to read. Starting from a contrast between traditional exchanges and Ethereum's execution model, the talk walks through how frontrunning reappears in this setting: DEX arbitrage, sandwich attacks, and the fee-bidding wars known as Priority Gas Auctions.
Drawing on “Flash Boys 2.0”, Daian et al. (IEEE S&P 2020), we will look at how the authors showed these bots operating in the wild, and why the revenue they extract, Miner Extractable Value (MEV), can give block producers a reason to fork the chain and rewrite history. We will close with how the industry has responded since the paper's publication.
Why care?
- For security and distributed systems people: MEV shows how a protocol can be sound at the consensus layer and still be exploitable once economic incentives enter the picture. The paper's "time-bandit attacks" make the case that transaction ordering is a security property, not a performance detail.
- For those curious about decentralized markets: the frontrunning Michael Lewis documented in Flash Boys takes a new shape when speed is replaced by transparency. On a public ledger, every order is visible before it executes, which makes the mechanics unusually easy to study.
The talk will be 45-60 minutes, followed by discussion, Q&A and snacks.
No prior background in blockchains or finance is required. However, basic familiarity with distributed systems will be beneficial.7 attendees
Past events
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