Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

. Sirer developed the Avalanche Consensus protocol underlying the Avalanche blockchain platform, and is currently the CEO and co-founder of Ava Labs. He was an associate professor of computer science at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...

, 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 An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

and

computer networking A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections ar ...

Education

Emin Gün Sirer attended high school at

Robert College The American Robert College of Istanbul ( tr, İstanbul Özel Amerikan Robert Lisesi or ), often shortened to Robert, or RC, is a highly selective, independent, co-educational high school in Turkey.The Turkish education system divides schools i ...

, received his undergraduate degree in computer science at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

, and finished his graduate studies at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

. He received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 under the supervision of Brian N. Bershad.

Career

Prior to his appointment as a professor at

, Sirer worked at

AT&T Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...

on Plan 9, at

DEC SRC The Systems Research Center (SRC) was a research laboratory created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1984, in Palo Alto, California. DEC SRC was founded by a group of computer scientists, led by Robert Taylor, who left the Comput ...

, and at

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

. Sirer is known for his contributions to operating systems, distributed systems, and fundamental cryptocurrency research. He co-developed the

SPIN (operating system) The SPIN operating system is a research project implemented in the computer programming language Modula-3, and is an open source project. It is designed with three goals: flexibility, safety, and performance. SPIN was developed at the University of ...

, 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.

Cryptocurrency

Karma is a virtual currency for peer-to-peer systems, introduced by Sirer and co-authors in 2003. It is designed to eliminate the free-loader problem, i.e. preventing malicious users from consuming resources without giving anything in return. It is the first peer-to-peer currency with a distributed mint. Sirer and Ittay Eyal wrote and published the paper "Majority is not Enough, Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable" which describes the selfish mining attack, an attack on

Bitcoin Bitcoin ( abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public di ...

which is profitable even for an attacker with only 33% of total hash power, which is less than the 50% required by the original security analysis in

Satoshi Nakamoto Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakam ...

's Bitcoin whitepaper. Sirer, Eyal, and other co-authors developed Bitcoin-NG, a bitcoin scaling solution, and Bitcoin Covenants, a security solution. Sirer is also co-founder of bloXroute, a company offering a solution to the scalability bottleneck of the Layer-0 network layer. In 2020 he was the co-director of IC3, the Initiative for Cryptocurrency And Contracts.

Avalanche protocol

Sirer led development of the Avalanche Consensus protocol, and its native token, AVAX. The Avalanche project was incubated at

, where Emin Gün Sirer was assisted by PhD candidates Maofan Yin and Kevin Sekniqi. Ava Labs is a technology company founded by Sirer in 2019, with the express purpose of developing an alternative blockchain technology for the financial sector.

Awards

*Brilliant-10 by

Popular Science ''Popular Science'' (also known as ''PopSci'') is an American digital magazine carrying popular science content, which refers to articles for the general reader on science and technology subjects. ''Popular Science'' has won over 58 awards, incl ...

National Science Foundation CAREER Award The National Science Foundation CAREER awards, presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors i ...

Patents

"A Process for Rewriting Executable Content on a Network Server or Desktop Machine in Order to Enforce Site-Specific Properties." Emin Gun Sirer and Brian N. Bershad. US Patent #6865735, issued February 3, 2005.

References

External links

*
Official Blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sirer, Emin Living people People associated with cryptocurrency American people of Turkish descent Turkish American American computer scientists Turkish computer scientists Robert College alumni Princeton University alumni University of Washington alumni Cornell University faculty Year of birth missing (living people)