At once revolutionary and also over-hyped, blockchains represent a dilemma: the underlying technology proposed to date is thoroughly incapable of living up to a fraction of the dream that has been sold to the masses. Current crop of blockchains are unable to scale: if Venezuela switched to Bitcoin today, every adult would be able to go to store once every 36 days. And moderately popular smart contracts, like Cryptokitties, render Ethereum unusable for days. Yet the dream of Byzantine fault tolerant systems that control money flows, without trusted parties, at great scale, remains as compelling as it is unreachable.

This talk will focus on an exciting recent development in blockchain infrastructure, a novel consensus protocol family called Avalanche that combines the best features of the Lamport-Liskov and Nakamoto protocol families that preceded it, to yield a currency with low latency to finality, high throughput, and high degree of decentralization. I will outline the design of new currency applications built on top of the new primitives this new foundation provides, and discuss how the protocol's inherent operation can help address the governance problems associated with cryptocurrencies. Finally, I will touch upon the next set of challenges that emerge when the consensus protocol is finally made efficient and scalable.

Emin Gun Sirer is a professor of computer science at Cornell University, founder of Ava Labs, and co-founder of bloXroute Inc, and co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts (IC3). Among other things, Sirer is known for having implemented the first currency that used proof of work to mint coins, for selfish mining, for characterizing the scale and centralization of existing cryptocurrencies, as well as having proposed the leading protocols for on-chain and off-chain scaling. Of all his collaborations, he is proudest of his contributions to the John Oliver Show's segment on cryptocurrencies.