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). He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems, and computer networking.

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.

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

Early cryptocurrency research – KARMA (2003) 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. 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.

In February 2005, Sirer was issued a patent for "A Process for Rewriting Executable Content on a Network Server or Desktop Machine in Order to Enforce Site-Specific Properties."

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.

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.

Sirer co-founded bloXroute Labs, a blockchain infrastructure company focused on addressing scalability challenges at the network layer (Layer-0) of blockchain protocols. The company provides a blockchain distribution network that enables blockchains to scale by addressing network-level bottlenecks. He also actively engaged with the Chinese-speaking community through the 8BTC Forum in November 2019.

Avalanche protocol

Sirer led the development of the Avalanche blockchain platform, and its native token, AVAX. 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.

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. Sirer denied any illegal or unethical deal. Roche subsequently left his law firm, Roche Freedman.

Congressional testimony (2023) 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.

CFTC Technical Advisory Committee (2023-present) 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.

Awards Brilliant-10 by Popular Science National Science Foundation CAREER Award