Share this article
Cornell Professor Unveils 'Simple Yet Powerful' Consensus Protocols
Cornell University professor Emin Gun Sirer announced a new family of consensus protocols at Token Summit on Thursday.
By Nikhilesh De
Updated Sep 13, 2021, 7:57 a.m. Published May 17, 2018, 10:30 p.m.
Make us preferred on Google
A pseudonymous team of developers have created a family of new consensus protocols for blockchains.
Cornell University professor and blockchain researcher Emin Gun Sirer announced the new protocols Thursday at Token Summit III in New York, explaining that they combine what he referred to as the "classical consensus" and "Nakamoto consensus" models in blockchain network decision-making.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
“The way this protocol works is incredibly simple yet incredibly powerful,” he said.
Sirer and his team have been working on the white paper for this protocol family for months, he said, but it was developed by a pseudonymous team called “Team Rocket” after the Pokemon characters.
Referred to as Snowflake, Snowball and Avalanche, the protocols randomly sample network participants, and ultimately choose a single result, Sirer said. “They rely on randomness and they rely on random interactions and yet they ensure after the interactions everyone has decided the same thing.”
According to the white paper:
“Inspired by gossip algorithms, this new family gains its safety through a deliberately metastable mechanism. Specifically, the system operates by repeatedly sampling the network at random, and steering the correct nodes towards the same outcome.”
Nakamoto consensus protocols (of which bitcoin is the best known) require miners to agree to a specific decision before it can be enacted, while classical consensus requires a two-thirds plus one majority, Sirer said during his talk.
However, not everyone agrees that this is a novel breakthrough.
Ethereum developer Vlad Zamfir said on Twitter that due to the nature of the protocols, they fail to combine “the best of Nakamoto consensus with the best of classical consensus” as Sirer asserted.
Zamfir, who is the leading researcher behind ethereum's upcoming proof-of-stake protocol Casper CBC, said the new protocols combine "the worst of both worlds," due to aspects of the code that could lead to weakened security.
“It's not asynchronously safe and it's probabilistic,” he said, later adding “We don't get to take a probabilistic model of the network for granted [in my opinion].”
William Mougayar and Emin Gün Sirer image by Nikhilesh De for CoinDesk
More For You
KuCoin captured a record share of centralised exchange volume in 2025, with more than $1.25tn traded as its volumes grew faster than the wider crypto market.
What to know:
- KuCoin recorded over $1.25 trillion in total trading volume in 2025, equivalent to an average of roughly $114 billion per month, marking its strongest year on record.
- This performance translated into an all-time high share of centralised exchange volume, as KuCoin’s activity expanded faster than aggregate CEX volumes, which slowed during periods of lower market volatility.
- Spot and derivatives volumes were evenly split, each exceeding $500 billion for the year, signalling broad-based usage rather than reliance on a single product line.
- Altcoins accounted for the majority of trading activity, reinforcing KuCoin’s role as a primary liquidity venue beyond BTC and ETH at a time when majors saw more muted turnover.
- Even as overall crypto volumes softened mid-year, KuCoin maintained elevated baseline activity, indicating structurally higher user engagement rather than short-lived volume spikes.
More For You
Coreweave stock gains 9% on fresh $2 billion Nvidia investment
Already an investor in CoreWeave, Nvidia last September had agreed to purchase $6.3 billion of computing services from the AI infrastructure provider.
What to know:
- CoreWeave shares jumped about 9% in pre-market trading after Nvidia invested another $2 billion in the AI-focused cloud company.
- The new funding is intended to help CoreWeave expand to more than 5 gigawatts of AI-dedicated data centers by the end of the decade.
- The deal deepens a yearslong collaboration in which Nvidia and CoreWeave will align on hardware, software and data center strategy, and test CoreWeave’s Mission Control resource-scheduling platform for potential integration into Nvidia’s ecosystem.
Top Stories
