Igli Kristo

MSc Informatics at UZH. AI major, Data Science minor. Based in Luzern.

igli.kristo@uzh.ch CV GitHub LinkedIn

About

I'm an MSc Informatics student at UZH (AI major, Data Science minor). Blockchain is where most of my work sits, but the interesting part is rarely the contract. Recursive leverage reads as a DeFi paper and is really a clustering and prediction problem: which wallets behave alike, and which positions are about to break. I ship Solidity to mainnet and spend about as much time in pandas as in Hardhat.

The rest of what I do is about whether a model's output can be trusted at all: whether an answer can be traced back to a source, and whether a system fails evenly across the people it gets used on. Before Zurich I did a BSc in Computer Science at Royal Holloway.

Research

Recursive leverage in yield-bearing stablecoins

2026

with Dawid Rymarczyk ยท Prof. Claudio Tessone, Krzysztof Gogol

Large wallets loop yield-bearing stablecoins on Aave and Morpho to stack extra yield. We ask whether those wallets actually follow a handful of shared strategies, how the strategies differ in how they manage risk, and whether the on-chain state of a position can tell you a stressful day is coming.

Experience

Solidity Developer, FVC Digital

Jun 2025 to now

I designed the protocol architecture, shipped the contracts to Ethereum mainnet, and own everything technical after that: security, audits, investor infrastructure, and the institutional partnerships a DeFi company needs to actually operate.

React Developer, TakeNow

Jun 2024 to Sep 2024

London

I spent the summer on TakeNow's Next.js app for a live shop: in-store kiosks, the online ordering flow, and the admin that sits on Prisma and MySQL.

Data Science Intern, Zappi

Aug 2023 to Sep 2023

London

Zappi tests product concepts with surveys. We built Concepts2Metrics to extract data-driven insights from those concepts, so the team could see which attributes actually mattered.

GitHub

Projects

AI vs human essay authorship detection

Sep 2025 to Dec 2025

Python, DeBERTa-v3, RoBERTa, stylometry

A detector for machine-generated academic essays, built with three others. The number everyone quotes is macro-F1. The one that mattered to us was whether the false positives landed on non-native English writers, because a detector that looks accurate overall can still be unusable for anyone writing in a second language. I did the preprocessing and tokenisation, across an 800k-sample training corpus and a separate hold-out set of essays by non-native speakers.

GitHub

Visual odometry pipeline

Nov 2025 to Jan 2026

Python, OpenCV

A moving camera has to reconstruct its own path from the video. With one camera that path has no scale in metres, and a fast rotation is enough to lose the track. We filmed a Swiss cablecar on a Samsung S20, used the phone's gyroscope to keep tracking when vision failed, and used its IMU to put the path into metres.

GitHub Report

DeFi staking pool on Base

Feb 2026 to Mar 2026

Solidity, Morpho, Chainlink Automation

Most staking apps pay you by printing a new token. This one does not. You deposit WETH, USDC or EURC on Base, the contract puts it into a Morpho vault, and a daily harvest sends you the yield in the same token you put in.

Live app

Knowledge-graph QA chatbot

Sep 2025 to Dec 2025

Python, SPARQL, Ollama

A chatbot that answers questions from a Wikidata-derived knowledge graph. It tries SPARQL first, falls back to embeddings when the graph has no hit, and only then asks a local LLM running on Ollama.

Report