# Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias

> Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias leads distributed systems research at Mysten Labs / Sui. A researcher specializing in technology transfer, he connects academic research with the realities of building distributed systems that run in production.

Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias leads distributed systems research at Mysten Labs / Sui. His work spans research leadership and technology transfer: translating between academic research, protocol design, applied cryptography, and the engineering of distributed systems that run in production. Previously an Assistant Professor at IST Austria and, before that, a Research Scientist at Facebook / Meta. PhD in Computer Science from EPFL; MEng from the National Technical University of Athens.

## Expertise

Distributed systems research leadership, Technology transfer between academic research and distributed systems engineering, Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus, DAG-based consensus, Applied cryptography, Decentralized storage, Storage engines and data availability, Blockchain execution and scalability, Key and binary transparency, Distributed randomness, Translating research into deployed distributed systems, Threshold cryptography, Asynchronous distributed key generation, Access-controlled encrypted data sharing.

## Verified impact

- Consensus: co-author of ByzCoin, OmniLedger, Narwhal and Tusk, Bullshark, Mysticeti, and Sui Lutris; research adopted in Sui.
- Key and binary transparency: co-author of Parakeet, which informed WhatsApp's deployed key transparency system, and CHAINIAC, for transparent and verifiable software updates.
- Storage: co-author of Walrus (CCS 2026), Tidehunter (VLDB 2026), and Proof of Availability & Retrieval in a Modular Blockchain Architecture (FC 2023).
- Threshold cryptography: co-author of ADKG (CCS 2020), Practical ADKG (IEEE S&P 2022), practical high-threshold ADKG (USENIX Security 2023), and Calypso, and the randomness research underlying drand and Cloudflare's League of Entropy.

## Google Scholar statistics

As of 2026-10-26: 8,758 citations, h-index 32, i10-index 48. Since 2021: 7,199 citations, h-index 31, i10-index 47. Source: [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7TOIlqkAAAAJ&hl=en). [Structured statistics](https://lefkok.github.io/scholar.json).

## Sources and machine-readable records

- [Students and mentorship](https://lefkok.github.io/mentorship/): Students, interns, and links to shared papers and preprints.
- [Mentorship data](https://lefkok.github.io/mentorship.json): Structured mentorship and shared research records.
- [Awards and honors](https://lefkok.github.io/awards/): Complete awards, fellowships, and academic recognition.
- [Awards data](https://lefkok.github.io/awards.json): Full structured awards record.
- [Professional profile](https://lefkok.github.io/profile.json): Current role, expertise, education, awards, contact and source links.
- [Research archive](https://lefkok.github.io/research.json): Complete paper titles, authors, venues, years, and original links.
- [Talks and authored writing](https://lefkok.github.io/media.json): Source links to recordings, talks, and articles.
- [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.gr/citations?user=7TOIlqkAAAAJ)
- [DBLP](https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/k/Kokoris=Kogias:Eleftherios)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lefteris-kokoris/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/LefKok)

## 2026 research

- [Thunderbolt: Concurrent Smart Contract Execution with Nonblocking Reconfiguration for Sharded DAGs](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09409): EDBT 2026; Best Paper Runner-Up.
- [Remora: Scale-out Deterministic Execution for Smart Contracts](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02817): VLDB 2026.
- [Tidehunter: Large-Value Storage With Minimal Data Relocation](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01873): VLDB 2026.
- [Walrus: An Efficient Decentralized Storage Network](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05370): CCS 2026.
- [Sunfish: Reading Ledgers with Sparse Nodes](https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1680): SBC 2026; research presentation at SBC, as confirmed by the author.

## Contact

lefteris@mystenlabs.com

Last updated: 2026-10-26. Current leadership responsibility confirmed by Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias.