Long before Avalanche existed, its co-founder was already rethinking how digital currencies could work. Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) co-designed a proof-of-work currency called Karma at Corne
Long before Avalanche existed, its co-founder was already rethinking how digital currencies could work. Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) co-designed a proof-of-work currency called Karma at Cornell University in 2003, alongside two of his students, Vivek Vishnumurthy and Sangeeth Chandrakumar. The paper, presented at the Workshop on the Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, predated Bitcoin by roughly six years.
Karma was not conceived as a general-purpose currency. It is described as the first peer-to-peer currency with a distributed mint using proof-of-work consensus, and was designed to address the free-rider problem in peer-to-peer networks by creating a decentralized economic framework where participants could not counterfeit currency. In short, it tracked what each user contributed to a file-sharing network versus what they consumed, and used proof-of-work to mint coins accordingly.
Sirer has acknowledged the project's limited reach. While Karma was widely cited and academically well-known, he did not pursue it beyond academia, and it was not adopted. The timing played a role too. The work on minting cryptocurrencies with proof-of-work was very well cited among academics, but Sirer did not pursue it further after being told funding would be difficult to find, particularly in the period immediately following 9/11. It is worth noting that Wei Dai's 1998 b-money proposal had sketched the idea of proof-of-work-based currency even earlier, meaning Karma was not the first written concept, but it was a working system with a concrete design.
Sirer's influence on Bitcoin's development did not stop with Karma. In 2013, he and Ittay Eyal, two researchers from Cornell's Department of Computer Science, released a paper titled "Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable," which detailed how a selfish mining attack would affect the Bitcoin network and other decentralized currencies using similar mining protocols.
The paper showed that a miner controlling only 33% of the hash rate could earn more than their fair share through selfish mining, challenging the original assumption that a majority of more than 50% of mining power was needed for such an attack.The strategy involves a colluding pool of miners deliberately withholding newly found blocks, constructing a private fork, and then selectively releasing it to maximise their share of main-chain rewards. The attack is now a standard reference point in blockchain security research.
Sirer later co-founded @AvaLabs, the company behind Avalanche (@avax), and continues to serve as its CEO. He is the founder and CEO of Ava Labs, the company behind the development of the Avalanche blockchain ecosystem. His career arc, from early proof-of-work experiments to identifying a core flaw in Bitcoin's incentive design to building one of the largest layer-1 blockchains, makes him one of the more consequential figures in the history of the space.
Sources:Wikipedia: Emin Gün SirerCornell University: KARMA Virtual Currency for P2ParXiv: Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable (Eyal and Sirer, 2013)
