Aneesha Chitgupi holds a PhD from the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. Her research experience includes working with Karnataka’s Finance Department at the Fiscal Policy Institute, where she focused on medium-term fiscal discipline, liability management, and debt sustainability. As a Visiting Research Fellow at the XKDR Forum, she worked in public finance, government contracting, and public procurement. Currently, she is a PhD intern at Nethermind, a blockchain research and software engineering firm, where she is exploring stablecoins and the tokenization of Real World Assets (RWAs), bridging her expertise in economics with emerging blockchain technologies especially in the domain of decentralized finance (DeFi).