On Wednesday (April 6), Dr. Emin Gün Sirer, Co-Founder and CEO of Ava Labs, the Brooklyn-based startup behind Avalanche ($AVAX) expressed his admiration for smart contract platform Cardano’s peer review and formal verification based approach.

His kind comments about Cardano were made when he replied to a tweet about an announcement Cardano Foundation made on April 5. As CryptoGlobe reported earlier today, in a blog post published on Tuesday (April 5), Cardano Foundation, which is “the non-profit organization and custodian of the Cardano blockchain” announced that it was partnering with “the Blockchain Center of the University of Zurich (UZH BCC), one of the leading research universities in Europe” for the next three years to “explore the development of blockchain education and research initiatives.”

This blog post went on to say:

The Cardano Foundation aims to establish a research collaboration with the Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (BDLT) Group at the University of Zurich. Additionally, it is geared towards two main objectives: contributing to the expertise of the BDLT Group and the continuous development of Cardano. 

The BDLT Group will provide valuable tools to the Cardano Foundation for the development and governance of Cardano, with a focus on the incentives behind the consensus protocol, and an extensive study of the economic activities on the platform. The research will explore different angles on the core questions surrounding Cardano as a secure, scalable, and decentralized system.

And the following day, here is what Dr. Sirer, who served as a computer science professor at Cornell University for over 20 years (between January 2001 and August 2021), had this to say about Cardano ($ADA) and its founder Charles Hoskinson.

These compliments came as a surprise to some members of the crypto community since Dr. Sirer has not always had good things to say about Cardano in the past.

In July 2018, Dr. Sirer was asked by CoinDesk to comment Ouroboros, which the Cardano website calls “the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol, and the first blockchain protocol to be based on peer-reviewed research.”

He told them:

Ouroboros has the advantage that it is peer reviewed and a well-credentialed research group stands behind the effort… But it also suffers from a downside that plague many early proof-of-stake protocols, namely: the papers are long, dense and full of subtle proofs.

No two researchers in this area seem to agree on which papers have valid proofs and which have redefined the properties so as to make proofs meaningless. The academic community vets papers for academic rigor, not real world application.

And this is what Charles Hoskinson had to say about Avalanche in an interview with Cointelegraph in April 2020:

I think Avalanche has some merit as well, especially in the IoT [Internet of Things] space in Ava is going to be an interesting coin that comes out. And there’s a lot of interesting ideas there.

Disclaimer

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