Draft:Kevin Sekniqi

Kevin Sekniqi is an Albanian–American computer scientist and entrepreneur. Sekniqi helped develop the Avalanche Consensus protocol underlying the Avalanche blockchain platform, and is currently the co-founder and COO of Ava Labs. Previously, he was a PhD candidate in computer science at Cornell University. He was a recipient of the Forbes 30 Under 30 award in 2022.

At Cornell, Sekniqi conducted research in distributed systems under the advisorship of professors Emin Gün Sirer and Robbert van Renesse. Sekniqi also conducted research in order-preserving encryption schemes and stablecoin economics. He interned at Microsoft and NASA.

In high school, Sekniqi started Bitcoin mining after reading a post on Reddit. In 2018, Sekniqi collaborated with Cornell professors Emin Gün Sirer, Robbert van Renesse, Associate Professor Ittay Eyal, and fellow doctoral student Maofan "Ted" Yin on the research leading to the discovery of Avalanche Consensus. The protocol was a deviation from classical consensus protocols, whereby probabilistic sampling replaced all-to-all communication. The research work was eventually commercialized into production with Ava Labs, which developed the Avalanche blockchain.