Avalanche Co-founder Emin Gün Sirer's Early Crypto Work Resurfaced
Avalanche (AVAX)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
bsc.news reports that Avalanche co-founder Emin Gün Sirer helped design the Karma proof-of-work currency at Cornell University in 2003, six years before Bitcoin. This peer-to-peer system used distributed minting to track user contributions and prevent free-riding in file-sharing networks. Sirer later co-founded Ava Labs and serves as its CEO, building the Avalanche blockchain ecosystem.
In 2013, he and Ittay Eyal published a paper identifying a selfish mining vulnerability in Bitcoin. They demonstrated that miners controlling just 33% of hash rate could gain unfair rewards by withholding blocks. This finding challenged the assumption that a majority of 50% was required for such attacks.
Sirer's academic work on currency design and mining incentives remains a standard reference in blockchain security. His career spans from early proof-of-work experiments to leading one of the largest layer-1 blockchains.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for AVAX, measured when this story was written up on 23 September 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
AVAX is trading at $11.31 with a 24-hour buy ratio of 50.2%, indicating balanced buying and selling pressure. Short-term activity shows weaker sentiment, with the 1-hour buy ratio at 34.8% and the 4-hour ratio at 44.5%. Volume delta is negative in the short term, showing -$213,359 in the last hour and -$892,346 over four hours. This means sellers are currently outpacing buyers in the immediate and near-term windows. However, the 24-hour volume delta is positive at +$281,281, suggesting net buying has occurred over the full day. Cumulative volume delta shows a net outflow of -$4,183,883 by the close, indicating sustained selling pressure despite the positive daily delta.
The latest daily buy ratio of 48.6% sits at the 40th percentile of the last 323 days, against a median of 49.2% - ordinary for this coin.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for AVAX, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, the average buy ratio was 48.1%, making today's 50.2% ratio slightly higher by 2.2 points. Spot volume was 0.94x the weekly average, indicating trading activity was near normal levels. The coin saw a 55.6% price increase over eight days, driven by two days of net buying out of seven. Total volume delta for the week was -$8,739,747, showing that sellers dominated the broader timeframe despite the price rise. This suggests the recent price action was not supported by consistent net buying across the entire period.