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Honest Majority by Common Prefix

Common Prefix

Honest Majority by Common Prefix explores the people and ideas shaping trust technology. Guests share their journey into the space, the technical problems they are solving, and where they see the next five years of secure, scalable, and interoperable distributed systems headed.

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  • 10 episodes
  • Avg 30 min
  • English

Episodes 10

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  • S1 · E10
    May 18 · 34 min

    Zoe Paraskevopoulou - Can You Trust Your Smart Contracts 100%?

    (00:00) Intro (01:39) Journey into Blockchain (04:09) Why Formal Verification for Smart Contracts (08:39) ACT Framework (12:37) State Transition Systems & Mathematical Models (21:37) Practical Application (28:10) LLMs & The Future of Formal Verification (31:29) Vision

  • S1 · E9
    April 28 · 26 min

    Giorgos Tsimos - Is FasterPay faster than FastPay?

    Timestamps: (0:00) – Intro (3:17) – Science and Engineering Synergy at Pod (9:12) – Pod Network's Latest Research (13:22) – Recovery Mechanisms (21:12) – Future Research Directions & Advice for New Researchers (26:15) – Outro

  • S1 · E7
    March 18 · 31 min

    Jason Milionis - Are Faster Block Times Eating up MEV?

    (00:00) Intro (02:00) Journey Into Blockchain Research (05:34) Explaining Loss Versus Rebalancing (12:29) Reducing Losses Through Faster Block Times (25:11) Future Research Directions (30:00) Papers and Resources

  • S1 · E6
    February 25 · 27 min

    Vitalis Salis - Making Bitcoin Useful Again with Trustless Lending

    Timestamps: (00:16) Introduction and background (03:00) Joining Babylon (05:43) The core idea behind Trustless Bitcoin Vaults (07:28) What “trustless lending” actually means (12:01) Deep diving into the protocol (14:38) BitVM and garbled circuits (18:48) Resources & recommended reading (21:30) Roadmap and upcoming milestones (22:22) What's next for the space (24:55) Advice for engineers building on Bitcoin Description: In the sixth episode of Honest Majority, we speak with Vitalis Salis, Head of Engineering at Babylon, about making Bitcoin useful again through trustless lending. Using the example of a BTC holder taking a stablecoin loan while keeping Bitcoin as collateral, the conversation explores what “trustless” means in practice and how enforceable guarantees can be designed without introducing custody. We discuss Trustless Bitcoin Vaults, how BTC can be locked into UTXOs under predefined conditions, and how supported-chain outcomes can be used to coordinate lending logic. The episode dives into Bitcoin’s constraints, BitVM and off-chain enforcement mechanisms, and the broader implications of extending Bitcoin’s security model beyond passive holding.

  • S1 · E5
    February 10 · 35 min

    Alberto Sonnino - The Story Behind Mysticeti, Sui’s Consensus Algorithm

    Timestamps: (00:28) Introduction and background (02:03) From academic prototypes to building real systems (06:38) Narwhal/Tusk and the "mempool saga" (10:05) FastPay (10:55) Libra winding down (12:13) Origins of Sui (16:18) Mysticeti (22:30) Recommended reading (24:40) Looking ahead: execution, privacy, usability, and building real applications Description: In the fifth episode of Honest Majority, we speak with Alberto Sonnino, Research Scientist at Mysten Labs, about the design and evolution of Mysticeti, Sui’s consensus protocol. Alberto traces his path from distributed systems research to building production blockchain infrastructure, including lessons from moving from paper prototypes to real-world systems. We unpack Mysticeti’s core ideas, DAG-based consensus, latency and throughput goals, and how it differs from earlier BFT and leader-based approaches, and discuss how consensus design interacts with networking, execution, and broader system assumptions. We close with Alberto’s recommended reading for getting up to speed, plus a look ahead at what matters most next: execution, privacy, UX, and building real applications.

  • S1 · E4
    January 21 · 24 min

    Shresth Agrawal - Killing Wall Street Flash Boys with Pod

    Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction and background (03:07) Pod origin story (06:58) From auctions to first-principles market design (09:58) System level optimization (15:15) Global, fast, and fair markets as Pod's north star (18:10) Roadmap (19:15) Looking ahead: global markets, payments, and adoption Description: In the fourth episode of Honest Majority, we speak with Shresth Agrawal, CEO of Pod Network, about building fast, fair, and global markets from first principles. The conversation traces Shresth’s path into blockchain research and engineering, including early work on light clients, Common Prefix’s formative years, and the research collaboration that led to Pod’s origins. From a Flashbots grant on decentralized auctions, the discussion follows how a simple protocol evolved into a broader vision for high-performance, leaderless market infrastructure. We then dive into Pod’s core technical ideas: eliminating blocks and leaders, confirming transactions in a single network round trip, and shifting bottlenecks from protocol logic to operating systems, networking, and memory. Shresth explains Pod’s continuous limit order book, the engineering behind achieving hundreds of thousands of orders per second, and why fairness and openness must be enforced at the protocol level, not assumed by market structure. The episode concludes with a discussion on where blockchain infrastructure delivers real value today, why Pod frames its mission around global markets rather than Web3, and how markets and payments may drive adoption in the years ahead.

  • January 9 · 33 min

    Aggelos Kiayias - Cardano Under Attack and Provable Security

    In the third episode of Honest Majority, we speak with Aggelos Kiayias, Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Chief Scientist at IOG, about the foundations of blockchain consensus and how formal security assumptions shape real-world protocols. The conversation covers Aggelos’ path into cryptography, his early work on modeling Bitcoin’s consensus, and the motivation behind Proof-of-Stake systems that do not rely on hashing power. Using the recent Cardano incident as a case study, the discussion then covers disagreement among honest nodes, temporary adversarial majorities, and the self-healing properties of Ouroboros. The episode concludes with a forward-looking view on privacy-enhanced smart contracts, zero-knowledge techniques, and the need to design blockchain infrastructure that remains secure in a post-quantum setting.

  • S1 · E2
    Dec 23, 2025 · 30 min

    Yannis Smaragdakis - How Does Static Analysis Secure Smart Contracts?

    Timestamps: (00:39) What is Dedaub? (01:50) Entry into the space (04:50) Why is static analysis important in Web3? (07:25) How do vulnerability metrics differ between academia and industry? (09:39) Deep dive on Dedaub's Decompiler (15:11) What are the solidity level challenges? (18:35) How does static analysis work? (21:15) Upcoming product launches from Dedaub (24:47) What about security? (27:12) Outlook for 2026 and beyond Description: In the second episode of Honest Majority, we speak with Yannis Smaragdakis about compilers, program analysis, and why software foundations matter for blockchain security. We discuss how compiler theory and static analysis translate into practical tooling, where today’s smart-contract tooling still falls short, and what it would take to make correctness and security guarantees part of the default developer workflow. The conversation explores the gap between academic techniques and production systems, and why closing it is critical for the next generation of blockchain infrastructure.

  • S1 · E1
    Dec 11, 2025 · 27 min

    Alex Evans - Can Data Availability be Zero Knowledge?

    Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:45) First steps in the space (04:34) Bain Capital: Origin Story (06:10) Is New York the new Crypto Capital? (07:43) Exciting research: ZK DA (12:06) Technical deep dive (21:16) Outlook for 2026 and beyond (26:55) Outro Papers mentioned: 1. Fraud and Data Availability Proofs: Maximising Light Client Security and Scaling Blockchains with Dishonest Majorities 2. ZODA: Zero-Overhead Data Availability

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