Hi! 👋 I'm Sergey Fedorov, an Independent Research Engineer. I'm mostly interested in designing practical, full-featured, composable, and configurable fault-tolerant replication systems, as well as exploring clear and expressive ways to implement them. I'm also enthusiastic about exploring alternative programming models for distributed computing. I think that decentralized Byzantine-fault tolerant mechanisms should dominate in future computing systems, and I'm very excited about working towards that.

I like to think of myself as someone discovering smart solutions to hard problems and doing this for the common good. In that, I believe in open source, open innovation and collaboration.

This is why I decided to found Replica_IO, an open-source framework for building practical distributed replication mechanisms. If you're also excited about this initiative, feel free to contact me! Let's make a breakthrough in designing and implementing distributed replication protocols for the future of decentralized computing 🚀

I began working as a software engineer back in 2009. First 7 years, I was mostly focused on developing low-level system software: I worked with such things as Linux kernel, microcontrollers, hardware emulation, and trusted execution.

In August 2016, I moved to Germany and joined the Security Group at NEC Laboratories Europe in Heidelberg, where I first got into research and development in the areas of blockchain, distributed and decentralized systems. I became absolutely excited about this, and since then, I keep expanding my knowledge and experience in that area, in particular, designing and implementing distributed protocols.

In April 2022, I left NEC and joined the ConsensusLab Group at Protocol Labs. I worked with Protocol Labs, doing research and open-source software engineering in the area of scalable decentralised consensus, until February 2023.

In March 2023, I decided to start the Replica_IO project, something that I've been thinking about for years, but never managed to find room for. With this project, I want to make a breakthrough in how distributed systems are designed and implemented in practice.

Here are some open-source projects I worked on:

• Interplanetary Consensus (IPC) - a framework to enable on-demand horizontal scalability of Filecoin blockchain. My main contribution was redesign and implementation of the atomic cross-chain transaction execution protocol in Rust.
• Mir - a framework for implementing, debugging, and analyzing distributed protocols. My main contribution was implementation of the checkpointing mechanism, protocol garbage collection, basic mechanism for reproducible testing with simulated time.
• MinBFT Hyperledger Lab - an implementation of MinBFT consensus protocol as a pluggable software component. I was the main author, contributor, and maintainer of the project.
• Qemu - a generic machine emulator and virtualizer. My main contribution was enhancing ARM emulation, enabling ARM TrustZone support, enabling multithreading support in the binary translation engine.

• W. Li, A. Sforzin, S. Fedorov, and G. O. Karame. Towards scalable and private industrial blockchains. In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, BCC ’17, page 9–14, New York, NY, USA, 2017. Association for Computing Machinery.
• C. Soriente, G. O. Karame, W. Li, and S. Fedorov. ReplicaTEE: Enabling seamless replication of SGX enclaves in the cloud. 2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), pages 158–171, 2019.

You can find more details about my working experience on my LinkedIn profile.