Wikipedia

Emin Gün Sirer

Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist. Sirer developed the Avalanche Consensus protocol underlying the Avalanche blockchain platform, and is the CEO and co-founder of Ava Labs. 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).[1] He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems, and computer networking.

Emin Gün Sirer
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma materPrinceton University
University of Washington
Known forSPIN, HyperDex, and Ava Labs
AwardsNational Science Foundation CAREER Award
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsCornell University
ThesisSecure, Efficient and Manageable Virtual Machine Systems. (2002)
Brian N. Bershad
Websitewww.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs

Education

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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.[2]

Career

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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),[3] where the implementation and interface of an operating system could be modified at run-time by type-safe extension code.[4] He also led the Nexus OS effort, where he developed new techniques for attesting to and reasoning about the semantic properties of remote programs.[5]

Early cryptocurrency research – KARMA (2003)

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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.[6] 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.[7]

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.[8]

In June 2016, days before the high-profile exploit of The DAO smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, Sirer and collaborators, including Vlad Zamfir, published a paper titled "A Call for a Temporary Moratorium on The DAO," identifying multiple security vulnerabilities.[9][10]

Sirer is also the co-founder of bloXroute, a company that offers a solution to the scalability bottleneck in the Layer-0 network layer.[11] In 2020, he was the co-director of IC3, the Initiative for Cryptocurrency and Contracts.[12]

Avalanche protocol

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Sirer led the development of the Avalanche blockchain platform, and its native token, AVAX.[13] Sirer founded Ava Labs in 2019 with the purpose of developing the blockchain technology for the financial sector. Sirer first developed Avalanche at Cornell with assistance from PhD candidates Maofan Yin and Kevin Sekniqi.[14][15]

In August 2022 a whistleblower "Crypto Leaks" published a report accusing Ava Labs and Sirer of making secret deals with the lawyer Kyle Roche aimed at attacking Avalanche's competitors.[16] Sirer denied any illegal or unethical deal. Roche subsequently left his law firm, Roche Freedman.[17]

Congressional testimony (2023)

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In June 2023, Sirer was an expert witness before the United States House Committee on Financial Services during hearings on the future of digital assets, providing technical and scientific perspectives on blockchain technology and its regulatory implications.[18][19]

CFTC Technical Advisory Committee (2023-present)

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In March 2023, Sirer was appointed to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technical Advisory Committee, where he serves alongside other technology and financial professionals to advise the Commission on issues such as technology, law, policy, and finance, particularly regarding blockchain technology and digital assets.[20][21]

Awards

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See also

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References

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  1. ↑ Allison, Ian (31 May 2017). "Cornell's blockchain experts tackle off-chain transactions with Intel SGX". International Business Times. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
  2. ↑ "University of Washington Systems Lab: Alumni". syslab.cs.washington.edu. Retrieved 25 October 2022.
  3. ↑ Bershad, Brian N.; Chambers, Craig; Eggers, Susan; Maeda, Chris; McNamee, Dylan; Pardyak, Przemysław; Savage, Stefan; Sirer, Emin Gün (1995-01-11). "SPIN — an extensible microkernel for application-specific operating system services". ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. 29 (1): 74–77. doi:10.1145/202453.202472. ISSN 0163-5980.
  4. ↑ "Extensibility, Safety and Performance in the SPIN Operating System" (PDF). University of California San Diego. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
  5. ↑ Shieh, Alan; Williams, Dan; Sirer, Emin Gün; Schneider, B. (2005). "Nexus: A new operating system for trustworthy computing". ACM Press: 1–9. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.72.340.
  6. ↑ "Karma Virtual Currency for P2P". Cornell University Department of Computer Science. June 2003. Retrieved 24 October 2022.
  7. ↑ Eyal, Ittay; Sirer, Emin Gün (2018). "Majority is not enough: bitcoin mining is vulnerable". Communications of the ACM. 61 (7): 95–102. doi:10.1145/3212998. ISSN 0001-0782. Retrieved 2026-04-10.
  8. ↑ Eyal, Ittay; Gencer, Adem Efe; Sirer, Emin Gün; Van Renesse, Robbert (2016-03-16). "Bitcoin-NG: a scalable blockchain protocol". Proceedings of the 13th Usenix Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. NSDI'16. USA: USENIX Association: 45–59. ISBN 978-1-931971-29-4.
  9. ↑ Sirer, Emin Gün (2026-04-28). "Ten years after Ethereum's DAO disaster, it's time to try again". Fortune. Retrieved 2026-05-14.
  10. ↑ Evans, Jon (2016-07-02). "A brief history of cryptocurrency drama, or, what could possibly DAO wrong?". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2026-05-14.
  11. ↑ "AMA Recap: DBCrypto and 8BTC". bloXroute Labs. 22 November 2019. Retrieved 24 October 2022. Our Co-Founder Professor Emin Gün Sirer synced up with our Chinese-speaking community on the 8BTC Forum...
  12. ↑ "Emin Gün Sirer As Digital Financier? United Kingdom's Open Central Bank Digital Currency Project". Forbes. Retrieved 14 February 2023.
  13. ↑ "A Cornell University Crypto Professor Is Launching His Own Coin". Bloomberg. 16 May 2019.
  14. ↑ "Blockchain startup raises a quick $42M in first sale". Cornell Chronicle.
  15. ↑ Leising, Mathew (April 17, 2020). "New Startup Aims to Prove Blockchain Is Fast Enough for Finance". Bloomberg. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
  16. ↑ "Crypto Leaks Risks Roche Freedman Losing More Class Action Work". news.bloomberglaw.com. Retrieved 2023-12-19.
  17. ↑ Carreyrou, John (2023-06-18). "He Went After Crypto Companies. Then Someone Came After Him". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-12-19.
  18. ↑ "Fostering Responsible Growth Of Blockchain Technology" (PDF). Retrieved 2023-10-09.
  19. ↑ "Hearing Entitled: The Future of Digital Assets: Providing Clarity for the Digital Asset Ecosystem". U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. 2023-06-13. Retrieved 2026-05-14.
  20. ↑ "Emin Gün Sirer | Keynote Speaker | AAE Speakers Bureau". www.aaespeakers.com. Retrieved 2025-08-28.
  21. ↑ Technology Advisory Committee Meeting - Cybersecurity, Decentralized Finance, and Artificial Intelligence Transcript 3/22/2023.
  22. ↑ "PopSci's 6th Annual Brilliant Ten". Popular Science. 3 October 2007. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
  23. ↑ Steele, Bill. "Cornell Profs Join NSF Campaign for Cybersecurity". Cornell University. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
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