Fantom names new Chief Research Officer

Fantom is proud to announce that Professor Bernhard Scholz will join Fantom as Chief Research Officer on May 1, 2022.

Prof. Scholz is a faculty member at the University of Sydney, where he specializes in programming languages. He has taken a leave of absence to work full-time at Fantom for at least two years.

Prof. Scholz’s research focuses on smart-contract execution, security, and performance. He has published extensively on programming languages and blockchains and has a strong understanding of the Fantom platform. He was recently appointed General Chair for the upcoming GPCE/Splash’22 conference and is widely recognized as an expert in his field.

Prof. Scholz is the creator of Souffle, a language for static program analysis used extensively by companies such as Oracle to find security bugs in Java JDK and check the correctness of Amazon’s VPC networks.

Before working on Souffle, Prof Scholz co-founded the SUN Microsystems Labs in Brisbane, where he helped create the Parfait bug tracking project, the de facto tool used by thousands of Oracle developers for bug and vulnerability detection in real-world, commercially sized C/C++/Java applications.

Prof. Scholz will lead all Fantom’s research efforts, including work on improving consensus. He will also direct a team of researchers and developers building an entirely new middleware stack and Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM) to significantly improve smart contract security and performance.

I’m excited to be joining Fantom in a full-time role. For the past few years, I and others at both the University of Sydney and Yonsei University have been focused on identifying problems with smart contracts and designing solutions to solve them. My primary goal is to implement these solutions in the real world to significantly improve the Fantom network with much faster, cheaper, and more secure transactions. ‒ Prof. Bernhard Scholz.

About Fantom

Fantom is a fast, scalable, and secure layer-1 EVM-compatible platform built on a permissionless aBFT consensus protocol. On Fantom, transactions are confirmed seconds and cost just a few cents. Speed, low transaction costs, and high throughput make Fantom ideal for DeFi applications and real-world use-cases.

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