Dahlia Malkhi

*Please note: this CyLab seminar is open only to partners and Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students, and staff.

Speaker:
Dahlia Malkhi
Professor
UC Santa Barbara

Talk Title:
From Libra to Space: Research Advances in Scaling Byzantine Consensus

Abstract:
The Facebook Libra (Diem) project aimed to create a global payment system using a consortium-operated blockchain. Libra, with Professor Malkhi as CTO, sought to be a regulatory-friendly financial system. Although Diem never launched, its technology had a big impact on the industry.

Libra used a Byzantine Consensus method called HotStuff. HotStuff's key breakthrough, linearity, tackled Byzantine Agreement issues in many settings. It unlocked tight upper bounds for partially synchronous, asynchronous, synchronous, and flexible models. Moreover, DiemBFT, the first large-scale HotStuff implementation for Libra/Diem, now powers the Aptos blockchain. Several platforms, like Cypherium, Flow, Celo, Espresso Systems, and Pocket Network, have also adopted HotStuff variants as their core consensus engines.

Today, SpaceComputer.IO employs HotShot, a production-grade HotStuff variant, to create a network of tamper-proof satellites. This talk will end with the technical challenges of achieving decentralization with security that can be verified from space.

Bio:
Dahlia Malkhi is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science of UCSB since 2024. She heads the Foundations of Financial Technology lab. Her research over two decades spans broad aspects of reliability and security of distributed systems, recently with focus on blockchains and advances in financial technology. Her work resulted in over 200 publications as well as a strong impact on computing technology.

Malkhi is sought-after industrial consultant, currently advising various projects, including Space Computer, Lyquor Labs, Nubit|Bitcoin Thunderbolt, Espresso Systems, and Chainlink Labs. Formerly, she served as Distinguished Scientist of Chainlink Labs (2022-2025). From 2019 to 2022, she was the CTO at the Diem Association, and Lead Researcher at Novi Financial. In 2014, she co-founded VMware Research and became a Principal Researcher at VMware until 2019. Prior to that, Malkhi was a partner principal researcher at Microsoft Research, 2004-2014; an Associate Professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a senior researcher at AT&T Labs.

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