Ava Labs Founder Emin Gün Sirer Miscredited with Inventing Avalanche Consensus

Emin Gün Sirer is the founder and CEO of Ava Labs, which developed the Avalanche blockchain and its AVAX token. Before crypto, he was a computer science professor at Cornell University, where he worked on distributed systems and peer-to-peer networks.

Sirer co-founded Ava Labs in 2018 with two graduate students and the Avalanche mainnet went live in September 2020. However, nearly every profile of Sirer describes him as the inventor of Avalanche consensus, which is not accurate.

The original white paper on Avalanche was published under a pseudonymous group's name in May 2018, and Sirer did not write it. He and his colleagues later published a formal follow-up paper that supplied the proofs and analysis for the protocol.