Pietro Saggese is Assistant Professor at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy, since November 2023. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Complexity Science Hub and the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology from 2021 until 2023. Pietro obtained his PhD at the Economics and Data Science department, IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy, in July 2021.

Pietro started delving into complex systems and economics during his university studies at the University of Turin, where he obtained both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics. During his PhD studies, he mostly worked on the identification of the arbitrage activity within the Bitcoin ecosystem – and of the investors who conducted it. The goal of these studies is to provide empirical evidence (yet lacking in the literature) of the nature of the arbitrageurs, showing that such investors are few, sophisticated, and specialized users, in contrast with theoretical assumptions from traditional finance.

In his research, Pietro is focusing mainly on crypto asset analytics, and in particular on investigating the interplay between Decentralised Finance (DeFi) protocols deployed in Ethereum, to gain insights into the potential risks and opportunities associated with them. His research interests include cryptofinance, cryptoasset analytics, and their socio-economic implications.