The ConsensusLab team is excited to welcome our first summer research fellows, who will be joining us at different times throughout the summer to work on some of our core research projects.

We asked our summer fellows about their paths to Protocol Labs Research, the projects that interest them most, and their thoughts about future technological developments:

Andrei Tonkikh

What brought you to PL?

The opportunity to contribute to bridging the theory and practice of distributed computing.

What are you working on? What would you like to work on?

Recently, I’ve been working on asynchronous and partially-synchronous consensus protocols, random number generation, and distributed key generation protocols. At Protocol Labs, I will be working on a practical implementation of a scalable structured mempool protocol.

What future technology are you most excited about?

I look forward to people learning to build societies (from a small company to a country to the whole of humanity) in ways that would be fair, resistant to dictatorship and populism, and would be the most beneficial in a long term. Maybe, one day, the knowledge that we get from studying fault-tolerant distributed systems could be applied to create fault-tolerant societies?

Xuechao Wang

What brought you to PL?

I was honored to be invited to give a talk at PL research seminar. During that time, I found that many of research projects at PL very interesting and exciting. Particularly, a few ongoing projects at ConsensusLab have strong connections to my past research experience. After spending several years in academia, I feel this could be a great opportunity for me to learn the real-world challenges of deploying consensus protocols in practice.

What are you working on? What would you like to work on?

I am thrilled to be part of the amazing ConsensusLab at PL. Currently, I am working on the consensus protocol of Filecoin mainnet, including the analysis of Filecoin Expected Consensus and the design and development of improvements and mitigations to any vulnerabilities. I would also like to work on any project that aims to improve Filecoin security and performance. In general, I enjoy designing, attacking and analyzing new consensus protocols.

What future technology are you most excited about?

I am most excited to see how killer apps of the blockchain technology such as decentralized storage and decentralized finance prevail in the next few years.

Yann Vonlanthen

What brought you to PL?

I watched one of the online talks held by a member of the PL ConsensusLab and was excited to see that we work on very similar topics.

What are you working on? What would you like to work on?

I am working on a state-of-the-art survey on concurrency control techniques in distributed systems.

What future technology are you most excited about?

Apart from blockchain and digital democracy, advances in rocketry and quantum computing.