Maofan Ted Yin is the Co-founder and Chief Protocol System Architect of Avalanche. Led by Emin Gün Sirer (CEO) alongside Kevin Sekniqi (COO), Avalanche is a decentralized, open-source proof-of-stake blockchain with smart contract functionality. ^[2]

Early Life & Education

Ted Yin participated in a summer program at Cornell University in June 2015, during which he co-created the Research Trends website over the course of two weeks, starting with no background in Flask, Weaver, and HypderDex. ^[1] His main interest in research is to build provably correct and practically effective systems. He Is passionate about research collaboration and often seeks out promising interns. ^[4]

Ted Yin majored in Computer Science during his undergrad at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. In 2019, he received his MSc. in Computer Science from Cornell University. In 2021, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, co-advised by Prof. Emin Gün Sirer and Prof. Robbert van Renesse. ^[5][3]

Career

2018

Maofan Ted Yin was a Research Intern at VMware where he worked on the theory and implementation of a new BFT consensus protocol, HotStuff, with Dr. Dahlia Malkhi and Prof. Michael K. Reiter.

2019

In 2019, Ted Yin co-founded AVA Labs and started working there as the Chief Protocol Architect (System).

Crypto Career

Maofan Ted Yin's career in crypto started in 2016 after he transitioned into blockchain from Artificial Intelligence. According to him, he wasn't that obsessed with calculus or continuous math as required in AI and so he started with Systems research with the help of Emin Gun Sirer. In the beginning, he was skeptical about cryptocurrency and blockchain because it felt "scammy".

In 2016 I thought cryptocurrency is about you know some cool hackers and like some Russian mafia, good enough to make a Hollywood film but too far away from me"

His first blockchain project was to work on the consensus mechanism of a blockchain infrastructure which was in line with the core research program he was interested in at the time. ^[13]

At Avalanche he worked closely with Kevin Sekniqi as a generator to generate new protocol specs while Kevin would try his best to attack the protocol until he found a protocol that stuck. ^[13]

Demos & Talks

• Scaling the Infrastructure of Practical Blockchain Systems (dissertation defense) ^[6]
• Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus (HotStuff) (Data Skeptic) [podcast] ^[7]
• Sync HotStuff (S&P 2020) ^[8]
• The Infrastructure for Blockchain 3.0 (Upbit Developer Conference 2019) ^[9]
• Snowball BFT Consensus Visualization ^[10]
• HotStuff Slides (PODC 2019) ^[11]
• HotStuff Slides (2018 Xi'an International Workshop on Blockchain) ^[12]