Speaker Event | Yonatan Sompolinsky at the Oxford Union
On March 12 at 5:00 PM, Kaspa co-founder and researcher Yonatan Sompolinsky will speak at the Oxford Union, the historic debating society at the University of Oxford.
The Oxford Union has hosted influential thinkers, scientists, political leaders, and public figures for more than two centuries. An invitation to speak there places a researcher among a long tradition of individuals whose work has shaped discussions around science, technology, economics, and public policy.
For Kaspa, this event reflects the academic roots behind the project and the broader research conversation surrounding decentralized networks.
Yonatan Sompolinsky is a computer scientist and blockchain researcher known for his work on scalable cryptocurrency protocols. He is one of the founders and leading researchers behind Kaspa.
Sompolinsky completed his PhD in computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His doctoral research focused on high throughput blockchain architectures and the ordering of distributed transactions. He later held a post doctoral research position at Harvard University.
At Harvard he researched transaction ordering protocols, distributed consensus, and maximal extractable value. His work contributed to the development of the GHOSTDAG protocol, which underpins the design of Kaspa’s blockDAG network. Kaspa’s architecture allows multiple blocks to be created and ordered in parallel rather than forcing blocks into a single chain, enabling faster confirmation times while maintaining proof of work security.
His work sits inside the academic lineage of blockchain consensus research, and ideas from his early work have already influenced one of the largest networks in the industry. Concepts from his research on the GHOST protocol helped inform design decisions in Ethereum, which adopted GHOST-inspired mechanisms for handling competing blocks.
Sompolinsky’s research has continued beyond GHOSTDAG. Together with Kaspa researcher, Michael Sutton, he contributed to the design of the DAGKnight Protocol, a next stage of blockDAG consensus that aims to adapt dynamically to real network conditions while maintaining Nakamoto-style security guarantees.
Unlike traditional blockchains that assume fixed network parameters, DAGKnight is designed to respond to actual network latency and maintain secure ordering even as conditions change. This approach aims to remove many of the performance limits that constrain traditional proof-of-work systems.
Sompolinsky has also described Kaspa’s broader objective through the concept of real-time decentralization, defined as the ability for a network to sample the honest majority in real time rather than across long confirmation windows.
In practical terms, this research direction aims to provide the security guarantees of Nakamoto consensus while enabling confirmation times measured in seconds rather than minutes or hours.
His invitation to speak at the Oxford Union reflects the growing recognition that research into decentralized systems is increasingly relevant to broader conversations about digital infrastructure, financial systems, and distributed computing.
As Kaspa continues advancing toward its next generation protocols, the discussion around scalable proof-of-work and real-time decentralized consensus is moving beyond technical forums and into global academic dialogue.
Events like this signal that the ideas behind Kaspa are being engaged not only within the cryptocurrency industry, but also within the wider research and policy communities that shape the future of digital infrastructure.