Scholar
Benedikt Bünz
Google Scholar ID: Hj82r7MAAAAJ
Professor of Computer Science, NYU Courant
Citations & Impact
Citations
5,383
H-index
21
i10-index
27
Publications
20
Co-authors
4
list available
Publications
Resume (English only)
Academic Achievements
- Ph.D. Thesis: "Improving the Privacy, Scalability, and Ecological Impact"
- Bulletproofs: A zero-knowledge proof system with extremely short proofs and minimal trust assumptions; deployed on Monero and Mobilecoin to secure tens of thousands of private transactions
- Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs): Key building blocks for environmentally friendly consensus; used in Chia, Filecoin, and Ethereum 2.0
- HyperPlonk: A SNARK designed for large, complex statements; removes FFT requirement, enabling better scalability, parallelizability, and support for high-degree custom gates (e.g., ZKEVMs)
- Published notable papers including:
- - "Context-Dependent Threshold Decryption and its Applications" (with Dan Boneh et al.)
- - "KZH-Fold: Accountable Voting from Sublinear Accumulation"
- - "DewTwo: A Transparent PCS with Quasi-Linear Prover, Logarithmic Verifier, and 4.5KB Proofs from Falsifiable Assumptions"
- - "ARC: Accumulation for Reed–Solomon Codes"
Background
- Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU Courant
- Cofounder and Chief Scientist of Espresso Systems
- Research focuses on the science of blockchains using applied cryptography, game theory, and consensus
- Aims to enhance privacy, usability, and security of blockchain protocols
- Passionate about problems requiring novel theoretical insights with real-world applications
