Yonatan Sompolinsky

Yonatan Sompolinsky is an academic at Harvard University for post-doctoral research in transaction ordering protocols and minimal extractable value (MEV) as they are related to the blockchain. He is a cofounder and computer scientist at DAGlabs. He authored and co-authored various blockchain research papers, including security analyses of the Bitcoin protocol.

Sompolinsky studied computer science and mathematics for his undergraduate degree. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was in the university's honors program. He continued to study at the same university for his master's degree, which focused on the security and scalability of blockchain networks. Later, Sompolinsky earned his PhD in computer science (also from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and is a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University.

His research works while obtaining his degrees included the topics of networks, Algorithmic Game Theory, and Bitcoin. He was under the supervision of Aviv Zohar, with whom he invented the GHOSTDAG protocol. The protocol would be the foundation of an open-source blockchain project he would launch in November 2021, Kaspa.

Sompolinsky also co-authored the SPECTRE protocol, a paper on Optimal Selfish Mining attacks, and several other papers that were well-received by the blockchain industry.