[8] In 2017, Catalini founded the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab, which brings together the fields of economics and computer science to study cryptocurrency protocols, their incentives and market design.

In 2018, Catalini joined David Marcus' team at Facebook, Inc. to develop the economical design of Libra (now Diem).

In 2013, Catalini earned a Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto (Rotman School of Management) for research supervised by Ajay Agrawal.

His research on these topics has been featured in Nature,[41][42] Science,[8] the New York Times,[43][44] CNN,[45] the Wall Street Journal,[46][47] the Economist,[48][49] CNBC,[50][51][52] WIRED,[53][54][55][56][57] NPR,[58] Forbes,[59][60][61] Bloomberg,[62][63] TechCrunch,[64][65] the Financial Times,[66] the Chicago Tribune,[67][68] the Boston Globe,[69][70] VICE news,[71][72] the Washington Post,[73][74][75][76][77] and Reuters[78][79] among others.

In 2017, Catalini received the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Junior Faculty Fellowship in Entrepreneurship Research.