Emin Gün Sirer

Emin Gün Sirer

CEO of AvaLabs, professor at Cornell University, co-director of IC3

Emin Gün Sirer kim?

Emin Gün Sirer is co-founder and CEO at Ava Labs and a prominent professor of computer science at Cornell University, where his research focuses on operating systems, networking and distributed systems. 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. Sirer spent many years teaching at Cornell prior to founding Avalanche, the most downloaded dissertation at Cornell University - a Ph.D. dissertation On Scalability of Blockchain Technologies was penned by Adem Efe Gencer in 2017 under the direction of Sirer and Robbert van Renesse.

In 2020:

- Mainnet of Avalanche was launched in Sep 2020
- Avalanche raised $42 million from its public sale in Jul 2020
- Avalanche raised $12 million from a private sale in June 2020 with investors including Bitmain and Galaxy Digital

Quotes:

"Meanwhile, we have seen crypto projects that just rebranded old protocols from 1999 as if they had a new invention. We've seen centralized coordinators, equivalent to a concealed wire. Best of all, we are beginning to see systems that don't even tolerate Byzantine faults!” (As reported by Cointelegraph)
“95% of the things out there as scams.” (As reported by Cointelegraph)
“The next cycle will revolve around ‘asset digitization,’ where mainstream financial professionals realize that issuing both physically-backed  (e.g., gold, real estate, commodities and the like) and purely financial (e.g., corporate debt instruments, CDSs, etc.) digital assets on blockchains confers enormous benefits. What is needed is an Internet of Finance, where any asset can be issued in a way that captures its unique properties, managed throughout its lifecycle in a legally compliant manner, and traded across the globe.” (As reported by Cointelegraph)

Picture source: Twitter Profile