Yann Vonlanthen

yvonlanthen@ethz.ch

I am a Ph.D. student at the Distributed Computing Group of ETH Zurich, where I am supervised by Prof. Roger Wattenhofer. My interests include the theoretical and practical aspects of distributed systems, blockchains and governance.

Currently my research focuses on scaling State Machine Replication protocols by reducing their use of consensus and enabling parallelization at all protocol levels.

Next to building scalable decentralized systems, I am also interested in Digital Democracy. I believe that through the careful use of new advancements (LLMs, VAAs, Liquid Democracy, Quadratic Voting, …) decision-making can be significantly improved. Changes to governance processes also come with dangers, which I would like to quantify in my research. Within the blockchain space, I see DAOs as an indication of what is to come, and believe that important lessons can be learned from them.

Finally, I am excited about the potential of Proof-of-Personhood and extending one-person-one vote into the digital realm. By re-designing decentralized systems from the ground up to include Sybil resistance, one could empower communities with potentially far-reaching economic and political consequences.

In my free time, I like to tend to my garden and do a variety of sports.

news

Jan 24, 2024	Our paper “Short Paper: The PoW Landscape in the Aftermath of The Merge” was accepted at the CoDecFin workshop at FC 2024.
Jan 15, 2024	Our talk proposal “Attacks on DAOs” was accepted at the DeFi workshop at FC 2024.
Dec 10, 2023	Our paper “Short Paper: Dissecting the EIP-2930 Optional Access Lists” was accepted at FC 2024.
Oct 5, 2023	In light of the up-coming swiss elections, we looked at potential dangers of Voting Advice Applications. Preliminary results were featured in Tages-Anzeiger today (online and print). Other newspaper have picked up the story too (20 min).

selected publications

arXiv
Fast Internet Computer Consensus

Massimo Albarello, Jakub Sliwinski, Yann Vonlanthen, and 1 more author

pre-print

Abs arXiv Bib

This paper presents the first rotating leader state machine replication (SMR) protocol that allows transactions to be confirmed in just a single round-trip time in the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) setting. Based on minimal alterations to the Internet Computer Consensus (ICC) protocol and with negligible communication overhead, we introduce a novel dual mode mechanism that enables optimal block finalization latency in the fast path. Crucially, the modes of operation are integrated, such that even if the fast path is not effective, no penalties are incurred. Moreover, our algorithm maintains the core attributes of the original ICC protocol, including optimistic responsiveness and rotating leaders without the necessity for a view-change protocol. We prove the correctness of our Fast Internet Computer Consensus (FICC) protocol and provide an open-source implementation of it. Both the FICC and original ICC protocol are compared in a globally distributed wide-area network. Our evaluation reveals that the FICC protocol achieves reduced latency compared to the ICC protocol, without requiring additional security assumptions. Furthermore, by increasing the number of replicas to n=5f+1, we exhibit that latency improvements close to the theoretical maximum of 33% are attainable. We conclude by highlighting the network topology as a significant factor in evaluating and comparing the latency of consensus algorithms.
@misc{albarello2023fast, title = {Fast Internet Computer Consensus}, author = {Albarello, Massimo and Sliwinski, Jakub and Vonlanthen, Yann and Wattenhofer, Roger}, year = {pre-print}, eprint = {2312.05869}, archiveprefix = {arXiv}, primaryclass = {cs.DC}, }
SSS 22
Consensus on Demand

Jakub Sliwinski, Yann Vonlanthen, and Roger Wattenhofer

In 24th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 2022

Abs arXiv Bib Poster Slides

Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions. We present a novel protocol that combines the benefits of an asynchronous, broadcast-based digital currency, with the capacity to perform consensus. This is achieved by selectively performing consensus a posteriori, i.e., only when absolutely necessary. Our on-demand consensus comes at the price of restricting the Byzantine participants to be less than a one-fifth minority in the system, which is the optimal threshold. We formally prove the correctness of our system and present an open-source implementation, which inherits many features from the Ethereum ecosystem.
@inproceedings{sliwinski2020cod, author = {Sliwinski, Jakub and Vonlanthen, Yann and Wattenhofer, Roger}, editor = {Devismes, St{\'e}phane and Petit, Franck and Altisen, Karine and Di Luna, Giuseppe Antonio and Fernandez Anta, Antonio}, title = {Consensus on Demand}, booktitle = {24th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems, Clermont-Ferrand, France}, year = {2022}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, pages = {299--313}, isbn = {978-3-031-21017-4}, eprint = {2202.03756}, }
CoDecFin@FC 23
The Hidden Shortcomings of (D)AOs - An Empirical Study of On-Chain Governance

Rainer Feichtinger, Robin Fritsch, Yann Vonlanthen, and 1 more author

In The 4th Workshop on Coordination of Decentralized Finance (CoDecFin) 2023, Bol, Brač, Croatia, 2023

Abs arXiv Bib

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a recent innovation in organizational structures, which are already widely used in the blockchain ecosystem. We empirically study the on-chain governance systems of 21 DAOs and open source the live dataset. The DAOs we study are of various size and activity, and govern a wide range of protocols and services, such as decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, infrastructure projects and common goods funding. Our analysis unveils a high concentration of voting rights, a significant hidden monetary costs of on-chain governance systems, as well as a remarkably high amount of pointless governance activity.
@inproceedings{feichtinger2023hidden, title = {The Hidden Shortcomings of (D)AOs - An Empirical Study of On-Chain Governance}, author = {Feichtinger, Rainer and Fritsch, Robin and Vonlanthen, Yann and Wattenhofer, Roger}, year = {2023}, eprint = {2302.12125}, archiveprefix = {arXiv}, primaryclass = {cs.CY}, booktitle = {The 4th Workshop on Coordination of Decentralized Finance (CoDecFin) 2023, Bol, Brač, Croatia} }