The Designing Defi Conference (D²) is a two-day academic conference taking place in New York on May 20–21, 2026. It is dedicated to research on the design, analysis, and evaluation of decentralized finance protocols, with a strong emphasis on incentives, economic mechanisms, and protocol-level innovation. The program includes keynote presentations from Jarry Xiao, co-founder of Ellipsis Labs, who will discuss perpetual decentralized exchanges and on-chain trading infrastructure, and Rajiv Sethi, a professor at Columbia University, who will speak on prediction markets. The conference also features a program committee of researchers from leading universities and DeFi organizations.