Benjamin Sepanski

Benjamin Sepanski

I am a Staff Compiler Engineer at Mythic, where I work on compilers.

Talks and presentations

Who Pays for Security Audits, Bounties, and Incentives

February 20, 2026

Talk, ETHDenver 2026, Denver, Colorado

Presented at ETHDenver 2026 in Denver, Colorado. Security audits and bug bounties are essential to blockchain safety, but who actually pays for them, and do the incentives align? This talk examines the economics behind security reviews: who bears the cost, how protocol teams decide what to spend, and how misaligned incentives between projects, auditors, and whitehats can leave critical vulnerabilities unfound — and what better incentive structures could look like. See the recorded video here.

AuditHub: A Platform for Professional Blockchain Audit Firms

November 19, 2025

Talk, DeFi Security Summit 2025, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Presented at DeFi Security Summit 2025 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. AuditHub is a platform for professional blockchain security audit firms that provides clients with transparency into the audit process while automating common audit workflows — managing findings, reports, and communications in one place to raise the overall quality bar for blockchain security engagements. This was joint work with Dr. Kostas Ferles and the Veridise team.

ZK 360 Panel – Future of ZK

April 26, 2023

Panel, ZK 360 during Consensus 2023, Austin, Texas

Panelist on the “Future of ZK” panel at ZK 360 during Consensus 2023 in Austin, Texas. The panel brought together builders and researchers to discuss where zero-knowledge proof technology is headed, and I represented the security and auditing perspective — speaking to practical challenges and risks in real-world ZK deployments. See the recorded video here.

Synthesizing Fine-Grained Synchronization Protocols for Implicit Monitors

December 06, 2022

Talk, OOPSLA 2022 at SPLASH 2022, Auckland, New Zealand

Presented at OOPSLA 2022 at SPLASH 2022 in Auckland, New Zealand. Writing correct fine-grained synchronization code for concurrent programs is notoriously hard and error-prone; this work presents a synthesis approach where, given a declarative specification of a monitor’s intended behavior, we automatically synthesize the correct synchronization protocol, eliminating a whole class of subtle concurrency bugs. This was joint work with Dr. Kostas Ferles, Rahul Krishnan, Dr. James Bornholt, and Dr. Işil Dillig.

Maximizing Performance Through Memory Hierarchy-Driven Data Layout Transformations

November 13, 2022

Talk, MCHPC 2022 at SC22, Dallas, Texas

Presented at MCHPC 2022 at SC22 in Dallas, Texas. High-performance stencil codes are typically tuned by transforming loop structure, but this work takes a different approach: the Bricks library improves performance by transforming data layouts to match the memory hierarchy instead, enabling significant speedups for structured-grid computations without manual code restructuring. This was joint work with Dr. Tuowen Zhao, Dr. Hans Johansen, and Dr. Samuel Williams at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; slides here.

Nonlocal UFL: Finite elements for Helmholtz equations with a nonlocal boundary condition

March 25, 2021

Talk, FEniCS 2021, Virtual Presentation through the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England

Presented at the FEniCS 2021 Conference (slides, abstract, and recording), joint work with Dr. Robert Kirby and Dr. Andreas Klöckner. This work introduces nonlocal boundary conditions for exterior Helmholtz problems that are exact (rather than approximate), relying on layer potentials evaluated via fast multipole methods. Integration of the layer potential library pytential with Firedrake allows these boundary conditions to be expressed naturally in UFL.

Augmented Hilbert series of numerical semigroups

January 13, 2018

Talk, Joint Mathematics Meetings 2018, San Diego, California

Presented at the AMS-MAA-SIAM Special Session on Undergraduate Research at the 2018 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, California, funded by an MAA Travel Grant for Undergraduates. This was joint work with Christopher O’Neill, Jeske Glenn, and Vadim Ponomarenko from the 2017 SDSU REU, presenting new explicit formulas for augmented Hilbert series that measure factorization lengths in numerical semigroups. A weighted Euler characteristic of an associated simplicial complex is a key ingredient in several of the formulas.