About Me

I am a Blockchain Scientist at Common Prefix. I obtained my PhD in Cryptography and Blockchains at the University of Edinburgh in 2021, under the supervision of Aggelos Kiayias. I've worked on building and analyzing decentralized applications on blockchains, layer-2 protocols, payment channels, and voting solutions, all through formal cryptographic methods. Among others, I've formally analyzed the security of the Lightning Network, created a novel virtual payment channel construction, and modelled the security of BitVM2. I have ample experience in software engineering and secure architecture. My interests further include formal verification, incentive analysis, and provable security.

My Work

Authors in alphabetical order except for starred (*) papers
(*) Linus, R., Aumayr, L., Zamyatin, A., Pelosi, A., Avarikioti, Z., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S., Maffei, M.: BitVM2: Bridging Bitcoin to Second Layers. In: USENIX Security (2026). Also appeared in: Science of Blockchain Conference (2025)
Fabiański, G., Stefański, R, Thyfronitis Litos, O. S.: A Formally Verified Lightning Network. In: Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Miyako Jima (2025)
Riahi, S., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S.: Bitcoin Clique: Channel-free Off-chain Payments using Two-Shot Adaptor Signatures. In: Applied Cryptography and Network Security, Abu Dhabi (2024) and Science of Blockchain Conference (2024)
Avarikioti, Z., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S.: Suborn Channels: Incentives Against Timelock Bribes. In: Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Grenada (2022)
Kiayias, A., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S.: Composable Security Treatment of the Lightning Network. In: IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, Virtual (2020)
Avarikioti, Z., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S., Wattenhofer, R.: Cerberus Channels: Incentivizing Watchtowers for Bitcoin. In: Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Kota Kinabalu (2020)
Kiayias, A., Livshits, B., Monteoliva Mosteiro, A., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S.: A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation. In: Tokenomics, International Conference on Blockchain Economics, Security and Protocols, Paris (2019)
Thyfronitis Litos, O. S., Zindros, D.: Trust Is Risk: A Decentralized Financial Trust Platform. In: Financial Cryptography and Data Security International Conference, Malta (2017)
(*) Escudeiro, N., Escudeiro, P., Soares, F., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S., Norberto, M., Lopes, J.: Recognition of hand configuration: A critical factor in automatic sign language translation. In: Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies, Lisbon (2017)
Kiayias, A., Teague, V., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S.: Privacy Preserving Opinion Aggregation. Submitted for publication at ASIACCS'26
(*) Thyfronitis Litos, O. S., Wu, Z., Musumeci, A., Hu, S., Helsby, J., Breza, M., Knottenbelt, W.: NodeChain: Cheap Data Integrity Without Consensus. Submitted for publication at DSN'26
(*) Dong, X., Tas, N., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S., Tse, D., Linus, R., Yang, L., Yu, M.: Remote Staking with Economic Safety. To be submitted for publication. Also appeared in: Workshop on Scalability & Interoperability of Blockchains (2024)
Kiayias, A., Schaller, M., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S.: Elmo: Recursive Virtual Payment Channels for Bitcoin. Submitted for publication at ICBC'26
(*) Bal, E., Aumayr, L., İyidoğan, A., Scaffino, G., Karakuş, H., Aslan, C. E., Thyfronitis Litos, O. S.: Clementine: A Collateral-Efficient, Trust-Minimized, and Scalable Bitcoin Bridge}.