About Prabal Banerjee
I am Prabal Banerjee, co-founder of Avail, where I lead research and engineering. Avail is a modular blockchain infrastructure project built around data availability — the problem of making sure that the data behind a block has actually been published, so that anybody who wants to verify a chain is able to.
Before Avail I was Lead Researcher at Polygon (previously Matic Network) from 2020 to 2023, working on improving a production proof-of-stake chain, contributing to scaling work such as zkRollups, and designing, prototyping and leading the development of Avail itself while it was still inside Polygon.
My academic background is in cryptology. I was a PhD student at the Cryptology and Security Research Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, from 2016 to 2020, and left before finishing to work on blockchains full time. Before that I read for an MSc in Computer Science at the Chennai Mathematical Institute and a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science at St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. Along the way I interned with the blockchain teams at IBM Research India, with Xoken Labs, with Oracle, and at Jadavpur University.
My published work sits mostly at the intersection of blockchains and cryptographic fairness: fair digital exchange, griefing attacks on the Lightning Network, decentralised marketplaces for content sharing, privacy-preserving data audit in the cloud, and proof-of-work schemes that do something useful. The full list, with links to the papers and their arXiv preprints, is on the home page.
I write occasionally. Essays are listed under writings. The best way to reach me is on X; my code is on GitHub and my other contact details are on the home page.