Yonatan Sompolinsky

Yonatan Sompolinsky is a computer scientist whose work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, cryptography and cryptocurrency. He emerged into the public view through academic and applied research that addresses fundamental challenges in decentralised consensus, transaction throughput and network security. His technical interests are grounded in the behaviour of replicated ledgers under adversarial conditions and the design of protocols that improve the efficiency and safety of decentralised systems.

Sompolinsky has published research that has influenced both academic discourse and engineering practice in the cryptocurrency field. He is known for advancing novel ideas about fork selection, block propagation and the use of directed acyclic graph (DAG) structures as alternatives to linear chains. Over time he moved from pure research toward practical system design and open-source development, collaborating with engineers and community contributors to translate theoretical proposals into working implementations.

Sompolinsky is the founding scientist at DAGLABS, an organisation that focuses on research and development of DAG-based ledger technologies. Within that role he has helped to formalise designs, produce reference implementations and guide protocol-level decisions. DAGLABS has served as a research and coordination hub for people exploring high-throughput, low-latency consensus mechanisms that preserve decentralisation and security trade-offs inherent to permissionless systems.

He is also the founder of Kaspa, a project that implements a blockDAG-style proof-of-work ledger. Kaspa builds on ideas intended to increase transaction throughput and reduce confirmation latency by allowing blocks to form a richly connected DAG instead of a single linear chain, while retaining a PoW-based Sybil-resistance mechanism. As founder and lead architect, Sompolinsky has been involved in protocol design, specification, and community-facing communication around incentives, attack resistance and the practicalities of deploying a blockDAG in an open network.

Sompolinsky’s public-facing writing and presentations emphasise pragmatic approaches to scaling decentralised systems without surrendering core security properties. He advocates designs that rethink assumptions held by early proof-of-work chains and that treat blocks as first-class units in a richer data structure. His outlook blends formal analysis with an implementation mindset: proposals are typically accompanied by experimental data, simulations or working code that demonstrate feasibility under realistic network conditions.

In recent years Sompolinsky has remained active in the broader cryptocurrency community through research publications, conference appearances and open-source project leadership. He engages with developers and researchers on questions of consensus safety, miner incentives and network dynamics. While his work is technical, it is also oriented toward practical deployment — balancing theoretical rigour with the engineering choices needed to run decentralised ledgers at scale — and continues to influence ongoing conversations about the future of blockchain and DAG-based protocols.