Cornell University shared a surprising revelation about this blockchain paper

A Ph.D. dissertation On Scalability of Blockchain Technologies has become the most downloaded dissertation at Cornell University in the past eight years. In his dissertation, Gencer proposed a new consensus method called Aspen — an algorithm that uses a process known as sharding to spread the workload involved in maintaining a blockchain across a peer-to-peer network.

Sirer spent many years teaching at Cornell prior to founding his own blockchain project, Avalanche. Similar to the principles in Gencer's dissertation, Avalanche emphasizes the importance of scaling, and uses its own unique algorithm to achieve leaderless consensus.

Timeline of Avalanche