Kevin Sekniqi
NationalityAmerican
Alma materCornell University
Macaulay Honors College
Known forAvalanche, Ava Labs
AwardsForbes 30 Under 30

Kevin Sekniqi is an Albanian–American computer scientist and entrepreneur. Sekniqi helped develop the Avalanche Consensus protocol[1] underlying the Avalanche blockchain platform, and is currently the co-founder and COO of Ava Labs. Previously, he was a PhD candidate[2] in computer science at Cornell University. He was a recipient of the Forbes 30 Under 30 award in 2022.[3]

At Cornell, Sekniqi conducted research in distributed systems under the advisorship of professors Emin Gün Sirer and Robbert van Renesse. Sekniqi also conducted research in order-preserving encryption schemes[4] and stablecoin economics.[5] He interned at Microsoft and NASA.[6]

In high school, Sekniqi started Bitcoin mining after reading a post on Reddit.[6] In 2018, Sekniqi collaborated with Cornell professors Emin Gün Sirer, Robbert van Renesse, Associate Professor Ittay Eyal, and fellow doctoral student Maofan "Ted" Yin on the research leading to the discovery of Avalanche Consensus. The protocol was a deviation from classical consensus protocols, whereby probabilistic sampling replaced all-to-all communication. The research work was eventually commercialized into production with Ava Labs, which developed the Avalanche blockchain.[7]

References

  1. ↑ "Avalanche Consensus". Retrieved 2023-10-30.
  2. ↑ "Blockchain startup raises a quick $42M in first sale". Retrieved 2023-10-30.
  3. ↑ "Kevin Sekniqi". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-10-30.
  4. ↑ Grubbs, Paul; Sekniqi, Kevin; Bindschaedler, Vincent; Naveed, Muhammad; Ristenpart, Thomas (2017). "Leakage-Abuse Attacks against Order-Revealing Encryption". 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). pp. 655–672. doi:10.1109/SP.2017.44. ISBN 978-1-5090-5533-3. S2CID 18085613. Retrieved 2023-10-30.
  5. ↑ Moin, Amani; Emin Gün Sirer; Sekniqi, Kevin (2019). "A Classification Framework for Stablecoin Designs". arXiv:1910.10098 [q-fin.GN].
  6. 1 2 "An ex-Microsoft engineer-turned Ava Labs cofounder told us how he went from mining bitcoin in his childhood home to starting one of the fastest growing blockchain developers in crypto — and shares his ambitions for the 'Apple of the blockchain world'". Business Insider. Retrieved 2023-10-30.
  7. ↑ "A Cornell University Crypto Professor Is Launching His Own Coin". Bloomberg.com. 16 May 2019. Retrieved 2023-10-30.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.