We are pleased to welcome Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias as an external collaborator on ConsensusLab projects.

Lefteris is an assistant professor at IST Austria, where he leads the Secure, Private, and Decentralized Systems (SPiDerS) group. He will be contributing his expertise to the design of highly scalable hierarchical consensus solutions, with fast intra-subnet finality and efficient cross-subnet transactions.

We asked Lefteris about his journey to this point, the projects he’ll be helping us with, and his thoughts about future technological developments:

How did you come to collaborate with ConsensusLab?

I have been following Marko’s work for many years. I even had the opportunity to work as part of the IBM Research team on cross-chain communications for Hyperledger Fabric (IBM’s permissioned blockchain) in 2018. As a result, when Marko described the challenges the ConsensusLab is facing on hierarchical consensus it was only natural to join forces!

What problems are you currently most interested in?

I am very interested in merging theoretical results with practical systems in order to find the best deployable solution instead of looking into asymptotics. Part of this work has led to developing more robust mempool designs such as Narwhal (https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11827) and consensus protocols such as Ditto (https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10362).

What future technology are you most excited about?

Although not my main research direction, I find self-driving vehicles, especially in urban infrastructure, a very exciting technology. They have the potential to revolutionize the way people commute and help with fuel consumption and climate change. Of course part of what excites me is for the potential of these cars to be managed by DAO’s and for users to charter them using virtual currencies.