Emin Gün Sirer

Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist and the co-founder and CEO of Ava Labs, where he led the development of the Avalanche Consensus protocol that powers the Avalanche blockchain platform and the AVAX token.

Ava Labsdevelops Avalanche, a high-speed, low-cost, eco-friendly blockchain platform. It also enables the creation and deployment of custom smart contract applications. AvaCloud helps businesses launch fully managed blockchains efficiently. It also offers Core, a secure digital wallet for trading, bridging, and transacting assets. Owl Explains provides educational resources on blockchain and Web3, covering core concepts, use cases, and policy developments.

Before founding Ava Labs, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Emin also served at AT&T Bell Labs, DEC SRC, and NEC. He co-foundedbloXrouteLabs, a company offering a solution to the scalability bottleneck of the Layer-0 network layer.He co-directed the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts (IC3), developed the SPIN operating system, and led the Nexus OS project. He created Karma, a peer-to-peer virtual currency system that was among the first to implement a distributed mint. He also developed Bitcoin-NG, a Bitcoin scalability proposal, and Bitcoin Covenants, which focuses on improving transaction security.

Emin Gün Sirer co-authored the influential paper “Majority is not Enough” with Ittay Eyal, which exposed a vulnerability in Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism called selfish mining. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and was named in Popular Science’s Brilliant-10.He holds U.S. patent #6865735 (2005) for a method of rewriting executable content to enforce site-specific properties. He was also appointed to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technical Advisory Committee.