Emin Gün Sirer

Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist. He is currently an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, co-director of IC3. He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems, and computer networking.

Sirer attended high-school at Robert College, received his undergraduate degree 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.

Before becoming a professor at Cornell University Sirer worked at AT&T Bell Labs on Plan 9, at DEC SRC, and at NEC.

Sirer 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.

In conjunction with his research group, he published the paper “Majority is not Enough, Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable” which described the selfish mining attack, an attack on Bitcoin with only 1/3 of total hash power. He also developed Bitcoin-NG, a bitcoin scaling solution, and Bitcoin Covenants, a security solution. He is also co-founder of bloXroute, a company focusing on solving the forgotten “layer 0” networking layer. He is also the founder of Ava Labs, a project building the cryptocurrency AVA, and computing platform using Avalanche Consensus.

• Ava Labs Founder & CEO
• Cornell University Associate Professor