Emin Gün Sirer, Founder and CEO of Ava Labs, discusses Avalanche’s multi-chain architecture, enabling scalable and decentralised blockchain applications. He highlights efforts to improve blockchain education and simplify smart contract programming with AI. Despite regulatory challenges, the Avalanche community remains focused on innovation and wider asset digitisation in the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.
Emin Gün Sirer is the co-founder and CEO of Ava Labs, the company behind the development of the Avalanche blockchain platform. Avalanche supports the creation of custom smart contracts. Before founding Ava Labs, Sirer was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and held positions at AT&T Bell Labs, DEC SRC, and NEC. His work in blockchain includes projects like Bitcoin-NG and co-authoring the paper “Majority is not Enough,” which exposed flaws in Bitcoin’s consensus protocol.
During the interview with Dinis Guarda, Emin Gün Sirer discusses the challenges and transformative process of shifting from academia to building Ava Labs and the Avalanche protocol:
“So as an academic, you write papers and as an academic, you’re beholden to your peers, and that’s about it really. But now, as an entrepreneur, you have to build something that actually solves real-world problems.
You have to not just come up with a theoretical improvement but a practical implementation that doesn’t suffer from any of the issues that other systems suffered from, that distinguishes itself, has product-market fit, and so on.
I was lucky enough again to be in a part of the country that hadn’t been mined by a bunch of other startups. So we were in upstate New York. It was a great place to start, and we quickly outgrew Upstate New York.
The move to New York City was a fantastic idea because we found ourselves closer to people who hold huge amounts of assets. This whole game it’s not a technological game. It is not like a tech trick that will sort of save the day.
Moving to New York City is closely coupled with digital asset or asset issuers who want to be digital, right? And being in a part of the country that most other people were not at with a full of other companies that are leading in their own domains, was a fantastic boost for us and we’ve been growing ever since.”
Multi-chain architecture of avalanche
Emin Gün Sirer discusses how Avalanche differentiates itself from other blockchain networks:
“We are still the world’s fastest consensus protocol. There is no other system that comes anywhere near us because of the unique way we’re structured.
Everybody else who tries to gain speed, they try to make something go fast, but you have to compromise somewhere. They’re typically compromising scalability.
We are true to crypto principles of decentralisation and opening systems up to everyone. Avalanche is different. It’s multi-asset, multi-chain. There are many chains working in parallel, working in unison, and to a user, they operate as if it’s just one chain, but really, they’re all different.
A game on Avalanche can have its own chain and be isolated from DeFi on Avalanche, which has its own chain, from institutional efforts on Avalanche, which have their own chain.
Each such chain that is launched actually expands the capacity of the system. Whereas with a single chain network, every time there’s a successful application, that application takes away resources from other apps.
We are still the adults in the room, partly because we’re not getting younger. But also genuinely because our technology is fundamentally different from the people who preceded us.
We have a fantastic community that we’ve been able to build, a community consisting of developers and various different applications, drawn by this architecture, drawn by this tech.
We sit here talking in the aftermath of the avalanche summit in 2025. Just a few thousand people were here on the premises.”
IC3 & blockchain literacy
Emin Gün Sirer addresses the challenges in educating the public about blockchain technology and its practical applications:
“If you build under a certain architecture, your fees will end up spiking. On Ethereum, there were times when it spiked up to $500 to carry out the transaction. So, if you looked around the world, $500 per transaction is not an amount that most people can afford.
There’s a reason why DeFi is not big in Nigeria, DeFi is big in England, DeFi is big in the US, but not in Africa. And that’s because of this problem.
There’s a lot of education that needs to be done. We have to educate people on what a wallet is, what self-custody means, and why it is that I can’t call a 1-800 number when I lose my secret phrases.
I was the co-director of an institute called IC3, where we tried to do this education. We ran the world’s first Ethereum boot camp. I spent a bunch of time with lawmakers.
One of the things that we’re doing on Avalanche is bringing AI into blockchains to try to make the programming of smart contracts far more natural.
The idea that we’re exploring at the moment is what we call coin-operated agents. Users program the chain in their natural language.
When I want to give some money to you, I just write, ‘I would like to give some money to this show to show my support for the five five AVAX and I can write in text far more complicated things. If you can’t do that, then I want my money back.’
This is not done, it’s in progress. The vision is clear, very crisp, and I think very compelling. It will bring this technology to the next batch of masses.”
A stronger Avalanche community
Emin Gün Sirer reflects on the successful gathering of the Avalanche community:
“The Avalanche community just got together, this is our annual event, and every time you have one of these gatherings, it’s kind of a time to sort of reflect on where we are technologically and what needs to come next.
Avalanche nailed the whole idea of multiple chains operating as one. There are a few other chains that have the same concept that started almost at the same time as us, but Avalanche is the strongest and best one.
It is time now for us to build even faster chains, like the performance of a single chain has to be faster, You could always gain speed by cutting corners by building a weird flying implement that kind of just flies and then falls into the ocean, that’s not the avalanche way.
I am leaving this particular gathering supremely energised and ready to build the sort of technical sort of road map that we talked about here, which involves building a new database, building new features into our system so that the performance of a single chain can be even faster.
I was really energised when I saw and spoke to some of the teams that were about to partake in the hackathon that’s coming up, some of the products I saw that they had built, some of the projects are just amazing and mind-blowing, it’s just makes banking services so cheap, so easy, so accessible.
None of that actually matters. If you’re building something that solves a societal need, if you’re making life easier, cheaper, faster, better, you are there to stay.
We lived through also just in the last year a period of regulatory uncertainty. And that was very jarring for many people. And there was an anti-crypto bent, especially in the United States. We’re coming out of that, and people are re-energised because they now have an administration in the US and legislators who understand the importance of crypto, and there’s clarity coming, and it doesn’t really matter what the regulation says as long as it’s clear.
That clarity will already be opening up doors for the digitisation of assets that were closed before. So I’m really, really thrilled and really thrilled to chat with you about our journey here as well.”
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