Emin Gün Sirer
Turkish-American computer scientist
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Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist. Sirer developed the Avalanche Consensus protocol underlying the Avalanche blockchain platform, and is currently the CEO and co-founder of Ava Labs.[1] He was an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University and is the former co-director of The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts (IC3).[2][1] He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems, and computer networking.
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Emin Gün Sirer | |
|---|---|
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| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Princeton University University of Washington |
| Known for | SPIN, HyperDex, and Ava Labs |
| Awards | National Science Foundation CAREER Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | Cornell University |
| Thesis | Secure, Efficient and Manageable Virtual Machine Systems. (2002) |
| Doctoral advisor | Brian N. Bershad |
| Website | www |
Education
Emin Gün Sirer attended high school at Robert College, received his undergraduate degree in computer science at Princeton University, and completed his graduate studies at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 under the supervision of Brian N. Bershad.[3]
Career
Prior to his appointment as a professor at Cornell University, Sirer worked at AT&T Bell Labs on Plan 9, at DEC SRC, and at NEC.
Sirer is known for his contributions to operating systems, distributed systems, and fundamental cryptocurrency research. He co-developed the SPIN (operating system),[4] where the implementation and interface of an operating system could be modified at run-time by type-safe extension code.[5] He also led the Nexus OS effort, where he developed new techniques for attesting to and reasoning about the semantic properties of remote programs.[6]
In March 2023, Sirer was appointed to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technical Advisory Committee.[7][8]
In June 2023, Sirer was an expert witness before the United States House Committee on Financial Services at a hearing on blockchain and digital assets.[9]
Cryptocurrency
In 2003, Sirer and co-authors Vivek Vishnumurthy and Sangeeth Chandrakumar introduced KARMA, a peer-to-peer virtual currency system that predated Bitcoin by five years. It is the first peer-to-peer currency with a distributed mint using proof-of-work consensus, introducing key concepts around decentralized trust management and incentive mechanisms for peer-to-peer resource sharing.[10] The system was designed to address the "free-rider problem" in peer-to-peer networks by creating a decentralized economic framework in which participants could not counterfeit currency and supply was regulated through anti-inflation mechanisms.[11]
Sirer and Ittay Eyal wrote and published the paper "Majority is not Enough, Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable," which describes the selfish mining attack. This attack on Bitcoin can be profitable for an attacker controlling as little as 33% of the total hash power, which is less than the 50% required by the original security analysis in Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper. Sirer, Eyal, and other co-authors developed Bitcoin-NG, a Bitcoin scaling solution, and Bitcoin Covenants, a security solution.[12]
Sirer is also the co-founder of bloXroute, a company that offers a solution to the scalability bottleneck in the Layer-0 network layer.[13] In 2020, he was the co-director of IC3, the Initiative for Cryptocurrency and Contracts.[14]
Avalanche protocol
Sirer led the development of the Avalanche Consensus protocol, and its native token, AVAX.[15] The Avalanche project was incubated at Cornell University, where Emin Gün Sirer was assisted by PhD candidates Maofan Yin and Kevin Sekniqi.[16] Ava Labs is a technology company founded by Sirer in 2019, with the expressed purpose of developing an alternative blockchain technology for the financial sector.[15][17]
In August 2022, whistleblower "Crypto Leaks" published a report accusing Ava Labs and CEO Emin Gün Sirer of secret deals with a law firm, Roche Freedman, aimed at attacking Avalanche's competitors.[18] Sirer denied any sort of illegal or unethical deal but the alleged partner Kyle Roche was subsequently forced out of his law firm.[19]
Awards
- Brilliant-10 by Popular Science[20]
- National Science Foundation CAREER Award[21]
Patents
In 2005, Sirer and Brian N. Bershad received U.S. Patent #6865735 for a process enabling dynamic rewriting of executable content on network servers or desktop machines to enforce site-specific security properties.[22]
In 2023, Sirer and co-inventors Kevin Sekniqi, Maofan Yin, and Robbert van Renesse received U.S. Patent #11816094 for "Metastable Byzantine Agreement," the foundational technology underlying the Avalanche consensus protocol.[23]