Dionysis Zindros
I’m Dionysis. I deal with cryptography and blockchains. I co-founded and currently run Common Prefix, where we’re driving the world towards the mainstream adoption of blockchains. I had the honour of doing my post-doc at Stanford with David Tse and my PhD at the University of Athens with Aggelos Kiayias.
I’m interested in consensus protocols in proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, light clients, interoperability, and their provable security. I appreciate elegant foundational research, but also the pragmatic deployment of real applications. In a past life, I was a software engineer at Google and Twitter, built Cardano at IOHK, and co-invented OpenBazaar.
I love flying the C172M over the Saronic gulf from LGTT, sailing the Ionian and Aegean seas, and voicing a dirty jazzy maj7-add9-add13 on the piano.
Common Prefix
I’m co-founder and CEO of Common Prefix, a blockchain research and development company. We bridge research and engineering to advance the interoperability, usability, and scalability of blockchain and trust technologies.
Our team proves protocols secure, designs new protocols from first principles, and implements them end-to-end for partners including Axelar, Ripple, Babylon, and Flashbots.
commonprefix.com
Publications
2025
- pod: An Optimal-Latency, Censorship-Free, and Accountable Generalized Consensus Layer
O. Alpos, B. David, J. Mitrovski, O. Sofikitis, D. Zindros
DISC ’25
- Blink: An Optimal Proof of Proof-of-Work
L. Aumayr, Z. Avarikioti, M. Maffei, G. Scaffino, D. Zindros
FC ’25
- Consensus Under Adversary Majority Done Right
S. Sridhar, E.N. Tas, J. Neu, D. Zindros, D. Tse
FC ’25
2024
- Light Clients for Lazy Blockchains
E.N. Tas, D. Tse, L. Yang, D. Zindros
FC ’24
- On-Chain Timestamps Are Accurate
A. Tzinas, S. Sridhar, D. Zindros
FC ’24
- A Better Proof-of-Work Fork Choice Rule
K. Kreder, S. Shastry, A. Tzinas, S. Vishwanath, D. Zindros
- Rollerblade: Replicated Distributed Protocol Emulation on Top of Ledgers
D. Zindros, A. Tzinas, D. Tse
2023
- Better Safe than Sorry: Recovering after Adversarial Majority
S. Sridhar, D. Zindros, D. Tse
- Proofs of Proof-of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity
S. Agrawal, J. Neu, E.N. Tas, D. Zindros
AFT ’23
- Cassiopeia: Practical On-Chain Witness Encryption
S. Saereesitthipitak, D. Zindros
FC Workshops ’23
- The Principal-Agent Problem in Liquid Staking
A. Tzinas, D. Zindros
FC Workshops ’23
2022
- Hours of Horus: Keyless Cryptocurrency Wallets
D. Zindros
FC Workshops ’22
2021
- Brick: Asynchronous Incentive-Compatible Payment Channels
G. Avarikioti, E. Kokoris-Kogias, R. Wattenhofer, D. Zindros
FC ’21
- Soft Power: Upgrading Chain Macroeconomic Policy Through Soft Forks
D. Zindros
FC Workshops ’21
- The Velvet Path to Superlight Blockchain Clients
A. Kiayias, A. Polydouri, D. Zindros
AFT ’21
- Mining in Logarithmic Space
A. Kiayias, N. Leonardos, D. Zindros
CCS ’21
- SoK: Communication Across Distributed Ledgers
A. Zamyatin, M. Al-Bassam, D. Zindros, E. Kokoris-Kogias, P. Moreno-Sanchez, A. Kiayias, W.J. Knottenbelt
FC ’21
2020
- Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work
A. Kiayias, A. Miller, D. Zindros
FC ’20
- Proof-of-Burn
K. Karantias, A. Kiayias, D. Zindros
FC ’20
- A Gas-Efficient Superlight Bitcoin Client in Solidity
S. Daveas, K. Karantias, A. Kiayias, D. Zindros
AFT ’20
- Updatable Blockchains
M. Ciampi, N. Karayannidis, A. Kiayias, D. Zindros
ESORICS ’20
- Smart Contract Derivatives
K. Karantias, A. Kiayias, D. Zindros
MARBLE ’20
2019
- Proof-of-Stake Sidechains
P. Gaži, A. Kiayias, D. Zindros
IEEE S&P ’19
- Proof-of-Work Sidechains
A. Kiayias, D. Zindros
FC Workshops ’19
- Compact Storage of Superblocks for NIPoPoW Applications
K. Karantias, A. Kiayias, N. Leonardos, D. Zindros
MARBLE ’19
- Cryptocurrency Egalitarianism: A Quantitative Approach
D. Karakostas, A. Kiayias, C. Nasikas, D. Zindros
Tokenomics ’19
2018
- Structure and Content of the Visible Darknet
G. Avarikioti, R. Brunner, A. Kiayias, R. Wattenhofer, D. Zindros
2017
- Trust Is Risk: A Decentralized Financial Trust Platform
O.S. Thyfronitis Litos, D. Zindros
FC ’17
Students & Advisees
I’ve had the privilege of advising several brilliant students.
Shresth Agrawal(CEO, pod network; ex-TU Munich)
“Proofs of Proof-of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity”
BSc, Jacobs University Bremen, 2022
Petros Angelatos(Software Engineer, Materialize; ex-CTO, balena.io)
Konstantinos Andrikopoulos(Software Engineer, Google)
MEng, NTUA, 2016
Alexis Brezas(CTO, pod network)
Roman Brunner(PhD candidate, Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
“Structure and Content of the Visible Darknet”
BSc, ETH Zürich, 2018
Georgios Christoglou(Bloomberg; ex-Microsoft)
MSc, Imperial College London, 2018
Stelios Daveas(Circle)
“A Gas-Efficient Superlight Bitcoin Client in Solidity”
MSc, University of Athens, 2020
Dimitris Grigoriou(Chainlink Labs)
BSc, University of Athens, 2018
Nikolaos Kamarinakis(Co-founder & CTO, Common Prefix)
Dimitris Karakostas(Co-founder, Common Prefix; ex-University of Edinburgh)
“Cryptocurrency Egalitarianism: A Quantitative Approach”
MEng, NTUA, 2016
Kostis Karantias(Chainlink Labs)
“Proof-of-Burn”, “A Gas-Efficient Superlight Bitcoin Client in Solidity”, “Smart Contract Derivatives”, “Compact Storage of Superblocks for NIPoPoW Applications”
MEng, University of Ioannina, 2019
Dimitris Kolotouros(GRNET)
MEng, NTUA, 2016
Dimitris Lamprinos(Software Engineer, pod network; Co-founder, Common Prefix)
Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos(Common Prefix)
“Trust Is Risk: A Decentralized Financial Trust Platform”
MEng, NTUA, 2017
Jakov Mitrovski(Common Prefix)
“pod: An Optimal-Latency, Censorship-Free, and Accountable Generalized Consensus Layer”
BSc, TUM, 2025
Christos Nasikas(Principal Software Engineer, Elastic)
“Cryptocurrency Egalitarianism: A Quantitative Approach”
MSc, University of Athens, 2018
Themis Papameletiou(Common Prefix)
Andrianna Polydouri(OpenZeppelin)
“The Velvet Path to Superlight Blockchain Clients”
University of Athens, 2021
Christos Porios(Schema Labs)
BSc, Imperial College London, 2017
Schwinn Saereesitthipitak(ML Systems Research, Stanford; Co-founder Sidenote)
“Cassiopeia: Practical On-Chain Witness Encryption”
Stanford, 2023
Vitalis Salis(Head of Engineering, Babylon Labs)
Eva Sarafianou(Product Security Engineering Lead, Mattermost)
MEng, NTUA, 2017
Odysseas Sofikitis(Common Prefix)
“pod: An Optimal-Latency, Censorship-Free, and Accountable Generalized Consensus Layer”
Apostolos Tzinas(Co-founder, Common Prefix)
“The Principal-Agent Problem in Liquid Staking”, “On-Chain Timestamps Are Accurate”, “A Better Proof-of-Work Fork Choice Rule”, “Rollerblade”
Teaching
I’m currently teaching a course on blockchain foundations:
Blockchain Foundations
A graduate-level course taught in Spring 2026 at the National Technical University of Athens mixing theory and practice and explaining what blockchains are, how they work, and why they are secure.
marabu.dev