Emin Gün Sirer
Emin Gün Sirer is the Founder and CEO of Ava Labs, the innovative team behind the Avalanche blockchain and the fastest, most reliable smart contracts platform in the world. Emin is a recognized computer scientist, software engineer and thought leader whose research over the last 20 years has focused primarily on network security, operating and distributed systems, and digital currencies. He is well-known for having implemented the first currency that used proof-of-work (PoW) to mint coins, as well as his research on selfish mining, characterizing the scale and centralization of existing cryptocurrencies, and having proposed the leading protocols for on-chain and off-chain scaling. He is also the Co-Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts (IC3), which aims to move blockchain-based applications from whiteboards and proofs-of-concept to tomorrow’s fast and reliable financial systems. Previously, he served as a prominent Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, where his research focuses on operating systems, networking, and distributed systems.
Emin Gün Sirer Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Founder and Chief Executive Officer
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Associate Professor of Computer Science
Academic History
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Ph.D., Computer Science
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B.S.E., Computer Science
Ava Labs provides an open-source platform for the creation and execution of decentralized applications and enterprise blockchain deployments.
Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry as measured by time-to-finality.
Ava Labs and Avalanche redefines the way people create value in Web3, empowering people to build an open, simple and democratic internet of finance.
Emin is best 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 safely 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.
His Karma system, published in 2003, is the first cryptocurrency that uses a distributed mint based on proof-of-work.
Most of his research emphasizes building systems based on principled reasons for their correct functioning.
His current projects involve a novel secure operating system and system infrastructure for high-performance cloud computing applications.
He likes building things, especially systems that have some principled reason for why they should work.
MEDIA & APPEARANCES
He has been profiled or featured in various financial media outlets, including CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, CoinMarketCap, Binance, Blockworks, and Real Vision.