Short Bio
Dr. Dahlia Malkhi is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and head of the Foundations of Financial Technology (Fftech) Research Lab (2024–). She is a leading expert in distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, security, blockchain technologies, and financial infrastructure.
Over a career spanning more than two decades, Dr. Malkhi has bridged foundational research with large-scale industrial systems through senior leadership roles across academia and industry. She previously served as Chief Technology Officer of the Diem Association and Lead Researcher at Novi Financial (2019–2022). Prior to that, she co-founded VMware Research and was a Principal Researcher at VMware (2014–2019). Earlier, she was a Partner Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (2004–2014), a tenured Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1999–2007), and a Senior Researcher at AT&T Labs (1995–1999).
Dr. Malkhi’s research has produced over 200 publications and has had lasting impact on modern distributed computing. She is a co-inventor of HotStuff, a foundational consensus protocol that underpins the Diem blockchain core engine and the Aptos blockchain core engine, among others. Her contributions also include co-inventing Flexible Paxos, which underlies systems such as LogDevice, creating CorfuDB, a database-less storage system used in VMware’s NSX-T distributed control plane, co-founding VMware Blockchain, and co-leading the FairPlay project, one of the earliest practical implementations of secure multiparty computation.
In parallel with her academic work, Dr. Malkhi serves as a sought-after advisor across the blockchain and financial technology ecosystem. Her roles include serving on the Coinbase Independent Advisory Board on Quantum Computing and Blockchain (established 2026), former Distinguished Scientist at Chainlink Labs (2023–2025), Distinguished Scientist at StableClear LTD (2025–present), and advisor to SpaceComputer IO, Lyquor Labs, Nubit Thunderbolt, and Espresso Systems.
Dr. Malkhi is an ACM Fellow (2011) and recipient of numerous honors, including the IEEE TCDP Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (2021). She has played a leading role in the research community, including serving on the ACM SIGOPS ATC Steering Committee (2026–present), chairing the ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award (2025), and previously co-chairing the Simons Institute Advisory Board (2019–2022). She has also served as program chair for major conferences including USENIX ATC 2019, LADIS 2012, Locality 2007, PODC 2006, Locality 2005, and DISC 2002. She has also served on the advisory board of Cryptoeconomic Systems since 2019.
Technology Impact
HotStuff
Renewed interest in the Blockchain world on scaling and robustifying the long standing problem of asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) Consensus.
In 2016 when designing the blockchain infrastructure at VMware’s blockchain project, we observed that all BFT solutions contain quadratic voting steps. Why is this so bad? When Byzantine consensus protocols were originally conceived, a typical target system size was n=4 or n=7, tolerating one or two faults. But scaling BFT consensus to n=2000 means that even on a ``good day’’ when communication is timely and a handful of failures occurs, quadratic steps require 4,000,000 messages. A cascade of failures might bring the communication complexity to whopping 8,000,000,000 transmissions for a single consensus decision. No matter how good the engineering and how we tweak and batch the system, these theoretical measures are a roadblock for scalability.
Around that time, tremendous innovation was occurring outside academic circles by blockchain startups. Two of these caught our attention, Tendermint and Casper. These protocols dramatically simplified the view change mechanism by introducing a synchronous delay when a leader starts. I observed that by adding one more phase to Tendermint, we can maintain the advantage of simplicity while avoiding the delay it introduced. The result is HotStuff: BFT Consensus in the Lens of Blockchain, named after a cartoon character in the same family of Casper, the first responsive BFT solution with a linear view-change.
Beyond improving communication complexity, HotStuff embodies a minimalist algorithmic framework that bridges between classical BFT solutions and the blockchain world; the entire protocol is captured in less than half a page of pseudo-code. HotStuff became popular in the blockchain developer community not only due to linearity, but (and perhaps mostly) due to its simplicity and developer-friendly design. Diem(Libra) adopted it to drive the blockchain infrastructure, as did (that we know of) Flow, Celo, and Cypherium.
Flexible Paxos
In the summer of 2016, I hosted a research intern named Heidi Howard from Cambridge, UK. I told her about the CorfuDB protocol and encouraged her to think about the performance benefit of separating the sequencer role from the rest of the system. The result has been a stunning revelation we named Flexible Paxos: Quorum Intersection Revisited.:
Each of the phases of Paxos may use non-intersecting quorums. Only quorums from different phases are required to intersect. Majority quorums are not necessary as intersection is required only across phases.
Everyone in the field of distributed systems knows that quorums in Paxos must intersect, so what gives? What Heidi observed is that Paxos, which lies at the foundation of many production systems, is conservative. Within each of the phases of Paxos, it is safe to use disjoint quorums and majority quorums are not necessary. Since the second phase of Paxos (replication) is far more common than the first phase (leader election), we can use Flexible Paxos to reduce the size of commonly used second phase quorums. By no longer requiring replication quorums to intersect, we have removed an important limit on scalability. Through smart quorum construction and pragmatic system design, we enabled a new breed of scalable, resilient and performant consensus algorithms. The algorithmic core of a production scale-out messaging bus at Facebook called LogDevice is based on it, as is the more flexible paxos of YouTube’s distributed MySQL backbone.
CorfuDB
In 2012, Phil Bernstein approached me at Microsoft Research with the following observation. RAM has grown cheap/large enough to hold a complete database index in memory. Therefore, one can build a fully replicated transaction processing engine by storing a database index completely in-memory, persisting index modifications to a shared commit-log. His team prototyped an in-memory index called Hyder. The key enabler for this vision would be a reliable, high throughput distributed log, which Phil wanted to stripe across an array of SSDs. Unfortunately (yet fotunate for me), the initial design of his distributed commit-log was flawed. While fixing the design, I extracted a foundational insight that motivated me to establish and lead the CorfuDB project.
CorfuDB is a database-less database built around a global, reliable, high-throughput distributed commit-log. The CorfuDB log serves as the source of ground truth around which one builds distributed control-planes for large clusters. The key paradigm underlying CorfuDB is the reliable log that operates at high throughput. This was the foundational insight I have taken from Hyder. I built the first CorfuDB PoC at Microsoft with OS license, and later drove it at VMware to production. At VMware, CorfuDB serves as the a distributed control-plane for NSX-T, a leading SDN product that has market volume of over $1B. At Facebook, CorfuDB was re-engineered in Delos, a control plane underlying a dynamic cluster storage backend system.
You might wonder what happened to Phil’s in-memory fully replicated DB. Several years later, it became the backbone of the SQL Azure cloud database.
Fairplay
In 2004, Noam Nisan and I asked ourselves whether cryptographic primitives which were considered completely impractical are actually becoming practical. With my PhD student Yaron Sella, we implemented the MPC protocol, while Noam supervised his grad-students to implement a language that compiles into a binary circuit. The first fully implemented Fairplay MPC platform was alive shortly after. By 2008, the the millionaires problem, mini auctions, and other problems, could be solved over an interconnect in seconds. Since then, the Fairplay source code has been downloaded by hundreds of academic groups, and has sparked in the past decade a wave of crypto-engineering projects which bring crypto theory into practice, including heavy crypto methods like oblivious RAM, ZK proofs and PCP.