About
Dr. Raghavendra Ramesh holds a PhD in Computer Science, specializing in formal methods, from the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, India. After his PhD and a brief postdoctoral stint at IIITB, he joined Oracle Labs in Brisbane. There, he worked at the intersection of formal methods and cybersecurity, developing static analysis tools for detecting security vulnerabilities in large Java codebases.
Drawn to the potential of Blockchain technology, Dr. Raghavendra transitioned to ConsenSys. He contributed to the Ethereum ecosystem by developing Atomic Crosschain technologies, formally proving the safety of consensus protocols, and engaging in Ethereum's statelessness approaches.
Inspired by Joshua Tobkin, the CEO of Supra, he joined the team to help realize the ambitious vision of Supra. Currently, he serves as the Vice President of Research at Supra, leading research teams across distributed protocols, programming languages, and formal methods. He specializes in Technology Transfer: effective and efficient transfer or research theory to robust implementation.
Interests and expertise
Rigorous testing has become a part and parcel of any software production line. But it can only get us so far. Complementing testing with tools and techniques based on formal methods and program analysis has a large value especially when the code organically grows and becomes huge. I passionately follow the line of formal verification and program analysis in knowing and realising the robustness of softwares to all possible threats.
Pushing more scientific thinking into a program language always helps in pushing the dev community by leaps. The guarantees become immediate at compile time (with smart IDEs just at the time of programming!). Rust, Golang, Functional programming are testimonies of this, and more recently Movelang for blockchains. We at Supra want to drive and mentor infrastructure devs as well as dapp-level devs towards greater abstraction and ease and simplicity all along being secure and performant.
Distributed protocols are the bedrock of modern software systems. Building highly efficient and securing these fundamental designs are of paramount importance and is becoming more and more a necessity. We at Supra treat all distributed protocols from an original perspective and contribute core insights so that the whole industry and community is benefited.
Commentary
Our CEO Joshua Tobkin has instilled “research first” mindset deeply in the organisation. Through his initiatives, visionary thinking, and core insights he has oriented research team towards marrying deep insights with practical utility. We have invented a high throughput, low latency, scalable family of consensus protocols which will power the Supra's positioning as IntraLayer.
We have carefully thought out the dynamics of highly secure Bridge Protocol from a more practical Rational model and carefully crafted a family of Bridge protocols and rigorously analysed them using game theoretic techniques.
Selected research publications
Visit the Research Center for more
2024
SUPRATECH | Whitepaper
Supra Containers: AppChains on Layer 1
with Dr. Parwat Singh Anjana & Joshua D. Tobkin
SUPRATECH | PUBLICATION
Formally Verifying the Safety of Pipelined Moonshot Consensus Protocol
with Praveen Manjunatha & Isaac Doidge
2023
SUPRATECH | Whitepaper
HyperLoop: Rationally Secure Cross-chain Bridge
with Dr. Easwar Vivek Mangipudi & Joshua D. Tobkin
SUPRATECH | Whitepaper
HyperNova Bridgeless Service
with Dr. Easwar Vivek Mangipudi
SUPRATECH | PUBLICATION
Moonshot Consensus: Optimistic Proposal for Blockchain-Based State Machine Replication
with Isaac Doidge & Joshua D. Tobkin • Read Litepaper
2022
Atomic Crosschain Transactions for Ethereum Private Sidechains
with Peter Robinson and Sandra Johnson • Blockchain: Research and Applications 3 (1), 100030
2017
An efficient tunable selective points-to analysis for large codebases
with Behnaz Hassanshahi, Padmanabhan Krishnan, Bernhard Scholz and Yi Lu • Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on State of the Art in Program Analysis
2012
Model-Checking Bisimulation-Based Information Flow Properties for Infinite State Systems
with Behnaz Hassanshahi European Symposium on Research in Computer Security
2011
Model-checking trace-based information flow properties
with Deepak D'Souza, Raveendra Holla and Barbara Sprick • Journal of Computer Security 19 (1), 101-138
“We at Supra want to drive and mentor infrastructure devs as well as dapp-level devs towards greater abstraction and ease and simplicity all along being secure and performant.”
Dr. Raghavendra Ramesh






