Biography
Moritz Platt is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Informatics, King's College London, where he researches identity-based consensus protocols for decentralised systems. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at King's in 2025, following earlier degrees from TU Berlin and Birkbeck, University of London.
Alongside his academic work, Moritz is a Technology Manager at Google, where he works on critical financial market infrastructure for capital markets clients. This dual perspective shapes a research agenda concerned with a single question: how do we design infrastructure that stays secure and fair even when incentives are misaligned?
Moritz is a sought-after speaker, having presented at the Bank of England, Deutsche Börse, the Crypto Valley Conference, Paris Blockchain Week and Proof of Talk, and has given guest lectures at King's, the University of Birmingham and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. He serves as Editor for Frontiers in Blockchain and the Iraqi Journal for Computer Science and Mathematics, and reviews for over forty journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and CHI.
Thesis Title: Reputation-Based Consensus in Decentralised Systems
Abstract: The emergence of permissionless decentralised systems, as exemplified in numerous public blockchains, presents a novel challenge in the field of distributed systems research, since these systems operate without a central control mechanism. Because such systems originate from circles intent on reversing the power relationship between government and citizens, some have assumed that they are better able than centralised systems to support the individual freedom of their participants, and may therefore be considered more democratic. While most permissionless decentralised systems achieve consensus via mechanisms resembling voting, the threat of Sybil attacks, in which attackers cast large numbers of bogus votes, makes the application of consensus mechanisms to approximate majority rule necessary. Due to the requirement of common consensus mechanisms to prove ownership of some resource (e.g. compute power or cryptocurrency) to participate in governance, they have to be considered plutocratic.
This thesis explores whether community-oriented and democratic systems governance following the principle of one person, one vote is possible in open networks, where no authorities are present to control network permissions. This is done through a combination of methods. Initially, a comprehensive literature survey is presented to identify evidence of such approaches to system governance in the wider literature. Then, novel governance approaches (e.g. Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Stake (PoS)) are investigated to evaluate whether they can measure up to centralised control mechanisms in terms of energy efficiency and whether their users are aware of how they compare. Subsequently, a consensus mechanism is proposed that aims to provide democratic system governance while consuming negligible electricity. To evaluate this novel consensus mechanism, Sybil attacks are simulated using agent-based modelling. Finally, a model for blockchain systems is defined and the conditions are evaluated under which decentralised systems can implement democratic system governance.
This thesis shows that, at the time of writing, only a small set of archetypal consensus mechanisms exist; namely, PoW, PoS, and variants of these. It then demonstrates that it is possible to establish a novel democratic consensus mechanism that approximates majority voting by combining primitives of PoS with a reputation system. The study further shows that, under relaxed conditions (e.g., when an attack is discoverable and the attackers can be identified), Sybil attacks on this novel democratic consensus mechanism can be prevented. However, ultimately, such a mechanism is shown to be unable to withstand Sybil attacks under generic conditions.
It can be concluded that, while blockchains may be effective as operating systems for democratic systems under certain premises (such as central admission), they are not universally suited to this purpose. This finding has consequences for those who design, build, and apply blockchain technology for self-governance.
Research Interests
Moritz's research examines whether open, permissionless networks can be governed democratically, on the principle of one person, one vote, rather than plutocratically through wealth or compute power. His work spans theory (agent-based simulation of attacks on consensus protocols) and practice (the real-world energy, privacy and policy consequences of blockchain design choices).
Key areas: decentralised systems security, particularly Sybil attack resistance; identity- and reputation-based consensus mechanisms; governance and fairness in permissionless networks; energy footprint and sustainability of blockchain consensus; distributed ledger technology in capital markets and financial infrastructure; information privacy in decentralised applications; and generative AI for scientific content analysis.
More at Moritz Platt
Research Centres or Groups
PhD Supervision
- Primary Supervisor: Professor Peter McBurney
- Secondary Supervisor: Professor Laurence Tratt