Soumya Basu

About Me

I am currently a PhD Candidate at Cornell University. I received a BS in Computer Science Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and an MS in Computer Science at Cornell University.

Currently, I am working on systems aspects of blockchain technologies. My projects include measuring and building infrastructure to make permissionless cryptocurrencies faster, exploring different security needs for users of blockchain technologies, and examining the economics of transaction fees. I am advised by Emin Gün Sirer and supported by the NSF GRFP Fellowship. Please feel free to contact me at soumya [at] cs.cornell.edu . My CV can be found here.

Publications

Trustless IoT: A Logic-Driven Architecture for IoT Hubs. Soumya Basu, Emin Gün Sirer. Proc. USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Edge Computing, 2020.
Efficient Verifiable Secret Sharing with Share Recovery in BFT Protocols. Soumya Basu, Alin Tomescu, Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Emin Gün Sirer. Proc. of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2019.
From mining to markets: The evolution of bitcoin transaction fees. David Easley, Maureen O'Hara, Soumya Basu. Journal of Financial Economics, 2019.
- Presented at RFSFintech Conference 2018
StableFees: A Predictable Fee Market for Cryptocurrencies. Soumya Basu, David Easley, Maureen O'Hara, Emin Gün Sirer. SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3318327, 2019.
- Appeared at Tokenomics 2019
- Appeared at Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research 2020
  Best Paper Award
- Appeared at INFORMS 2021
Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum Networks. Adem Efe Gencer, Soumya Basu, Ittay Eyal, Robbert van Renesse, Emin Gün Sirer. Proc. of the Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference, 2018.
Enabling secure and resource-efficient blockchain networks with VOLT. Srinath Setty, Soumya Basu, Lidong Zhou, Michael L. Roberts, Ramarathnam Venkatesan. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2017-38, August 2017.
Effective Evaluation using Logged Bandit Feedback from Multiple Loggers. Aman Agarwal, Soumya Basu, Tobias Schnabel, Thorsten Joachims. Proc. of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2017.
Rollback Recovery for Middleboxes. Justine Sherry, Peter Gao, Soumya Basu, Aurojit Panda, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Christian Macciocco, Maziar Manesh, João Martins, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Luigi Rizzo, and Scott Shenker. Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM, 2015.
Best Student Paper
Problems Before Solutions: Automated Problem Clarification at Scale. Soumya Basu, Albert Wu, Brian Hou, and John DeNero. Proc. of the ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, 2015.

Blog Posts

The Old Fee Market is Broken, Long Live the New Fee Market by Soumya Basu, David Easley, Maureen O'Hara, and Emin Gün Sirer on Tuesday January 22, 2019
Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum by Adem Efe Gencer, Soumya Basu, Ittay Eyal, Robbert van Renesse, and Emin Gün Sirer on Monday January 15, 2018

Press

StableFees

Blockchain fees are broken. Here are 3 proposals to fix them. by Hackernoon on May 29, 2019

From mining to markets: The evolution of bitcoin transaction fees

Transaction fees change the culture of bitcoin, study says by Cornell Chronicle on October 30, 2019
Blockchain’s weakest links by Chicago Booth Review on November 26, 2018

Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum

Demystifying Decentralisation by Lexology on August 4, 2019
Decentralisation in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks by the morning paper on February 16, 2018
Decentralization vs Scale: Crypto's Growing Struggle by CoinDesk on January 24, 2018
Researchers at Cornell Release Paper on Cryptocurrencies by Cornell Sun on January 23, 2018
Bitcoin network isn't as decentralised as you believe, study reveals by PCMag India on January 22, 2018
Bitcoin and Ethereum have a hidden power structure, and it’s just been revealed by MIT Technology Review on January 18, 2018
Cornell Professor Claims Ethereum is More Distributed and Decentralized Than Bitcoin by CoinJournal on January 17, 2018
Bitcoin’s utopia has failed as big players hold all the power by New Scientist on January 17, 2018
Cornell Researchers: Bitcoin Not as Decentralized as Assumed by Bitcoin.com on January 16, 2018

Falcon Network

Inside IC3: How Cornell is Advancing the Science of Bitcoin by Coindesk on March 29, 2017
Cryptocurrency Networking with Soumya Basu by Software Engineering Daily on March 27, 2017
How Falcon, FIBRE and the Fast Relay Network Speed Up Bitcoin Block Propagation (Part 2) by Bitcoin Magazine on July 29, 2016

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant for CS 4410/CS 4411 (Operating Systems) at Cornell University

Undergraduate Student Instructor for CS 61A (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) at the University of California, Berkeley