Alistair Stewart

Alistair Stewart is the lead researcher at the Web3 Foundation, where he has shaped much of Polkadot's core protocol design. He is the architect of GRANDPA, Polkadot's Byzantine finality gadget, and has worked on the network's nominated proof of stake validator selection and its availability and validity scheme. He came to blockchain research from academia, with a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh on infinite-state stochastic models and postdoctoral work in learning theory and robust statistics at the University of Southern California. More recently he has published work with Elizabeth Crites disproving long-standing conjectures about Reed-Solomon proximity gaps that underpin the security of modern proof systems.

6 talks by Alistair Stewart