Yann Vonlanthen

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yvonlanthen@ethz.ch

I am in my fourth and final year as a Ph.D. student at the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich, where I am advised by Prof. Roger Wattenhofer. My research interests span the theoretical and practical aspects of blockchains, distributed systems, and digital democracy.

More specifically, I aim to design and build fast and scalable decentralized systems — for instance by introducing fast paths, reducing the need for consensus, or enabling parallelization across all protocol levels.

I also enjoy exploring the security of existing systems, including network security, consensus protocols, and application-level security (DAOs, VAAs, etc.).

Lastly, I am excited about proof-of-personhood and the potential benefits of building decentralized systems with built-in Sybil resistance.

In my free time, I enjoy gardening and participating in a variety of sports.

news

Aug 23, 2025 Our paper “Kudzu: Fast and Simple High-Throughput BFT” was accepted at DISC 2025.
May 20, 2025 Our paper “Recommender Systems for Democracy” was accepted at IJCAI 2025 and IC2S2 2025.
Jan 23, 2025 Our paper “Deanonymizing Ethereum Validators: The P2P Network Has a Privacy Issue” was accepted at USENIX Security 2025.
Dec 6, 2024 I presented our paper “Banyan: Fast Rotating Leader BFT” at Middleware’24. Thrilled to announce that it received the Best Paper Award 🏆.
Oct 5, 2024 I will be serving as a PC member for FC’25.

selected publications

  1. Kudzu: Fast and Simple High-Throughput BFT
    Victor Shoup, Jakub Sliwinski, and Yann Vonlanthen
    39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), Berlin, Germany, 2025
  2. Deanonymizing Ethereum Validators: The P2P Network Has a Privacy Issue
    Lioba Heimbach, Yann Vonlanthen, Juan Villacis, and 2 more authors
    In 34th USENIX Security Symposium, Seattle, USA, 2025
    Awarded a bug bounty by the Ethereum Foundation.
    Non-archival: TUM Blockchain Conference (TBC), Sep 2024
    Non-archival: Ethereumzuri.ch Conference, Jan 2025
  3. Banyan: Fast Rotating Leader BFT
    Yann Vonlanthen, Jakub Sliwinski, Massimo Albarello, and 1 more author
    In 25th ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware), Hong Kong, China, 2024