Luca Zanolini

I work on distributed systems across the full range from theory to running code — designing consensus protocols, proving them correct, and carrying them into specifications, implementations, and tests. The underlying question is 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 fast confirmation rule and contributed to its specification and testing, and led the security analysis of enshrined proposer–builder separation — an analysis that surfaced specification bugs, since fixed upstream in consensus-specs. 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 work applies distributed-systems rigor to autonomous AI: Reliable Distributed Agent Systems, open infrastructure for cooperating agent systems, built in Rust.