Luca Zanolini

I work on consensus protocols, Byzantine fault tolerance, and the security foundations of distributed systems — the formal question of how mutually distrusting machines agree, and when a network can irreversibly commit to a decision.

Until September 2026 I was a Research Scientist on the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Consensus team, working on the long-term evolution of Ethereum's consensus layer: I co-designed 3-Slot Finality, Ethereum's planned faster-finality upgrade, co-authored the security analysis of its fork-choice rule (RLMD-GHOST, IEEE CSF 2024), and contributed the security analysis of enshrined proposer–builder separation. I hold a PhD from the University of Bern, where I developed the theory of asymmetric trust under Prof. Christian Cachin; my background is in Mathematics (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), with a focus on abstract algebra and cryptography.

I teach the way I like to learn — by building. As a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge (2025–26) I supervised students in Concurrent and Distributed Systems, and my open course Concurrent and Distributed Systems in Rust implements the field's classical protocols from scratch as executable, adversarially tested artifacts. My current research direction applies distributed-systems rigor to autonomous AI: reliable infrastructure for cooperating agent systems.