The Network of Networks: Emin Gün Sirer’s Journey and Why Everything of Value Belongs On-Chain

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Emin Gün Sirer to discuss his journey from Turkish immigrant to Cornell professor to CEO of Ava Labs. I ask why Bitcoin’s incentive model needed a reality check, how Avalanche differs from single-chain architectures, and what it will take for crypto to go truly mainstream.

From Broken Systems To An Engineer’s Mission

Emin’s story begins with frustration. Growing up in Istanbul, the daily reality was that “nothing worked”. Bank systems failed, airport screens crashed, and even doors didn’t close properly. That friction hardened into a lifelong obsession with building reliable, self-organising systems. It propelled him through Princeton, a PhD, and 19 years on Cornell’s computer science faculty. He describes himself simply as “a geek who loves to build large-scale distributed systems that organise themselves,” and that ethos would steer him into crypto.

Inventing Karma And Learning From Bitcoin

In 2002, long before Bitcoin, Emin designed Karma, an internet currency to fix freeloading in file-sharing networks. It used proof-of-work minting and a finite supply to reward contributors and nudge communities towards healthier behaviour. Looking back, he credits Satoshi with two decisive upgrades.

First, the integration of consensus with coin creation through mining, which collapsed issuance and agreement into the same process. Second, a broader post-crisis vision: Bitcoin positioned itself as a new store of value rather than a narrow protocol for peer-to-peer file-sharing. “He nailed two fronts that I did not,” Emin says.

Challenging Sacred Cows: Selfish Mining

In 2013, Emin and a co-author published the selfish mining paper, showing miners could sometimes earn more by withholding blocks than by following the protocol. The work challenged the cherished claim that Bitcoin was incentive-compatible below fifty-one percent hash power.

The backlash was ugly, spanning everything from“death threats,” to campaigns to have Cornell dismiss him, before subsequent simulations validated the finding. The aim, he insists, was not to tear Bitcoin down, but to characterise it accurately so the ecosystem could defend itself in practice.

Against Maximalism, For Science

That sceptical, engineering-first stance shapes Emin’s view of maximalism. He calls it “absolutely horrible,” a form of religion that freezes thinking at a moment in time. To be fair, maximalism binds communities and sells narratives, such as the enduring store-of-value messaging, but dogma over data is ultimately fatal in technology. The only thing worth treating as sacred, he suggests, is the scientific method.

Avalanche’s Multi-Chain Thesis

Avalanche is Emin’s answer to both hype and bottlenecks. He argues it introduced the third family of consensus, after Nakamoto and classical, and pairs that with a conviction about scale: the future is a network of networks. “Avalanche is not a single chain. It allows anyone to build their own blockchain on top,” he says.

Rather than jamming every user into one lane, high-demand applications can spin up their own chains with their own validators and resources, and still interoperate seamlessly. The chain that wins in the long run will be the one that can absorb the incoming adoption and scale.

Blockchain Gaming Proof

The thesis is visible in gaming, where studios demand speed, reliability, and transparent item economics. Avalanche has attracted titles from the gritty Off the Grid to the beloved MapleStory Universe. Assets live on-chain, so scarcity and drops become auditable instead of opaque. If a studio says only a certain number of weapons will ever exist, players can verify it. The experience must feel like a top-tier console game while seamlessly inheriting the trust guarantees of a public ledger.

Real-World Assets As The Foundation Of Defi

Emin’s grand vision of “digitising all the world’s assets” is not abstract. He points to land records migrating on-chain so ownership can be verified instantly and transfers can be clean, auditable, and fast. Once assets are digital, they become primitives for finance: a title can serve as collateral in minutes rather than weeks. He sees hundreds of trillions of dollars of value eventually represented on blockchains, with real estate alone in the two-hundred-trillion range.

The Marketing Gap And The “Show Me” Era

For all the engineering ambition, Emin is candid about a weakness: marketing. While other projects perfected that art, Ava Labs kept shipping infrastructure. He believes the market is maturing past the selfie era, where founders were influencers or politicians, and into a “show me” phase. In that world, the question is simpler: what have you actually built that works at scale?

Trials That Clarified Purpose

Behind the scenes, the human cost has been real. During COVID, two close family members battled cancer while he was building one of crypto’s most prominent companies. He also recounts being debanked amid a broader chill on crypto. 

Those experiences sharpened his sense of purpose. “It’s just money,” he says; what matters is demonstrating technology that decentralises power and fixes what people hate about big tech—data hoarding, surveillance, and concentration of wealth.

Making Crypto Feel Simple

Emin thinks the back end is ready; the bottleneck is user experience. Wallets remain punishing. Ava Labs is pushing Core, a rethought interface, and experimenting with AI-powered chains that let users express intent in natural language rather than write code. “Say it in French or Tagalog,” he says, and the chain’s agents interpret and execute clear instructions. If crypto is to become the default settlement and service layer, it must feel as normal as the web did when it finally crossed the chasm.

Why New York, And What The Endgame Looks Like

He builds from New York for a reason. This is where financial assets sit, where institutional relationships are made, and where scrutiny is high. If the mission is tokenising the real economy, you go where the real economy is. Looking ahead, Emin expects winner-takes-most dynamics in core infrastructure. He imagines Avalanche as a fast settlement fabric that other ecosystems can anchor into, even Bitcoin, with proof-of-work “double stitching” layered on decisions finalised at high speed.

Closing Note

The chip on his shoulder from broken systems never left. Emin just turned it into a consensus protocol and a platform designed to carry everything of value the modern economy can throw at it.The market is entering a season of proofs rather than promises. That, he believes, is exactly where Avalanche shines.

“It is being able to change the world… and prove to all of the crypto naysayers that crypto is the solution to a lot of the problems they perceive with big tech.”

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