Open to outside engagements.
Hi! 👋 I'm Sergey Fedorov, an Independent Research Engineer who enjoys investigating distributed protocols and complex concurrent systems, seeking clarity, correctness, and simplicity in their design and implementation. My engineering background spans from low-level systems software and trusted execution (TEE) to distributed BFT consensus and decentralized blockchain systems.
Much of my interest centers on decentralized, Byzantine-fault tolerant mechanisms — though I suspect the underlying insights may open new perspectives on distributed coordination in general, maybe even beyond computing itself. I believe in open source, open innovation, and collaboration.
Replica_IO is my own initiative in this direction — an independent, open-ended effort to rethink distributed and concurrent computing from first principles. The emerging ideas are to take shape in a minimalistic, Rust-based open-source framework for core replication and coordination mechanisms of decentralized, distributed systems, such as BFT consensus. This work has been kindly supported by BlueYard Capital through their DYOR funding program.
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've been 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 decentralized 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. So far, this effort has involved studying some notable distributed protocol implementations and frameworks for implementing distributed protocols, as well as starting to develop a novel model of concurrent, distributed computation. I've also shared insights from this effort in talks at Protocol Berg v2 and Web3 Summit in 2025.
Since October 2025, I've been working with the Interplanetary Consensus (IPC) team again, doing protocol research and engineering: conceptual analysis, technical proposals, and systematic code review of core protocol changes.
Here are some open-source projects I've worked on (past and present):
- Replica_IO — my own initiative to rethink distributed and concurrent computing from first principles, with the emerging ideas intended to take shape in a minimalistic, Rust-based framework for core replication and coordination mechanisms of decentralized, distributed systems.
- Interplanetary Consensus (IPC) — an open-source blockchain extensibility and scalability solution. My past contribution was redesign and Rust implementation of the atomic cross-chain transaction execution protocol; my more recent involvement covers conceptual protocol analysis, cross-chain mechanism proposals, and core protocol implementation reviews.
- Mir — a framework for implementing, debugging, and analyzing distributed protocols. My main contribution was implementation of the checkpointing mechanism, protocol garbage collection, and a basic mechanism for reproducible testing with simulated time.
- MinBFT Hyperledger Lab — an implementation of the 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, and enabling multithreading support in the binary translation engine.
- New insights into distributed and concurrent programming
- Replica_IO blog companion videos:
- 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.