Emin Gün Sirer

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Emin Gün Sirer
NationalityTurkish
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)
Doctoral advisorBrian N. Bershad
Websitewww.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs

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.

Education[edit]

Emin Gün Sirer attended high school at Robert College, received his undergraduate degree in computer science at Princeton University, and finished 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[edit]

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.

In June 2023, Sirer was an expert witness before the United States House Committee on Financial Services for a hearing on blockchain and digital assets.[7]

Cryptocurrency[edit]

Introduced by Sirer and co-authors in 2003, five years before Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, Karma is a virtual currency for peer-to-peer systems, introduced by Sirer and co-authors in 2003.[8] 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.[9]

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 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's Bitcoin whitepaper. Sirer, Eyal, and other co-authors developed Bitcoin-NG, a bitcoin scaling solution, and Bitcoin Covenants, a security solution.[10]

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

Avalanche protocol[edit]

Sirer led development of the Avalanche Consensus protocol, and its native token, AVAX.[13] The Avalanche project was incubated at Cornell University, where Emin Gün Sirer was assisted by PhD candidates Maofan Yin and Kevin Sekniqi.[14] 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.[13][15]

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.[16] Sirer denied any sort of illegal or unethical deal but the alleged partner Kyle Roche was subsequently forced out of his law firm.[17]

Awards[edit]

Patents[edit]

"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.[20]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b "IC3 - Projects (Alumni Faculty)". www.initc3.org. Cornell Tech, New York City. Retrieved 24 October 2022.
  2. ^ Allison, Ian (31 May 2017). "Cornell's blockchain experts tackle off-chain transactions with Intel SGX". International Business Times. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
  3. ^ "University of Washington Systems Lab: Alumni". syslab.cs.washington.edu. Retrieved 25 October 2022.
  4. ^ Bershad, Brian N.; Chambers, Craig; Eggers, Susan; Maeda, Chris; McNamee, Dylan; Pardyak, Przemyslaw; Savage, Stefan; Sirer, Emin Gün (1994). "SPIN - An Extensible Microkernel for Application-specific Operating System Services". CiteSeerX 10.1.1.47.8338. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ "Extensibility, Safety and Performance in the SPIN Operating System" (PDF). University of California San Diego. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
  6. ^ 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. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  7. ^ "Fostering Responsible Growth Of Blockchain Technology" (PDF). Retrieved 2023-10-09.
  8. ^ Vishnumurthy, V; Chandrakumar, S; Sirer, Emin Gün (5 June 2003). "Karma: A secure economic framework for p2p resource sharing" (PDF). Proceedings of the First Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems. Berkeley, California. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
  9. ^ "Karma Virtual Currency for P2P". www.cs.cornell.edu. June 2003. Retrieved 24 October 2022.
  10. ^ 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.
  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 b "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. ^ "PopSci's 6th Annual Brilliant Ten". Popular Science. 3 October 2007. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
  19. ^ Steele, Bill. "Cornell Profs Join NSF Campaign for Cybersecurity". Cornell University. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
  20. ^ "US6865735B1 - Process for rewriting executable content on a network server or desktop machine in order to enforce site specific properties". Retrieved 2023-10-19.

External links[edit]

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