Common Prefix
Blockchain protocol design and formal verification consulting team
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About Common Prefix
Common Prefix is a security research firm focused on blockchain protocols and cryptographic systems, working between an academic lab and an audit house: it builds formal models of consensus, payment engines, crypto libraries and proof systems, checks implementations against specification with machine-assisted proofs, and publishes reproducible findings with fixes. Public work includes audits of the BLS12-381, Groth16 and ECDSA components of the fastcrypto library used by Sui, and formal verification of Mysten Labs' Seal decentralised secrets service and the XRP Ledger consensus layer, whose findings were fixed in XRPL 3.2.0.
It issues no assets; its place is upstream credibility. Projects commission reviews of ZK circuits, MPC and FHE implementations, cross-chain messaging layers and payment clearing logic, and the conclusions feed governance votes and institutional onboarding before mainnet. Unlike scanners, it works on semantic gaps between what a specification says and what code does; deliverables are audit reports and specifications, with coverage bounded by the engagement.
In June 2026, Common Prefix completed a formal verification of the XRP Ledger Lending Protocol (XLS-66) using Lean 4, strengthening contract correctness guarantees. The same month it also published an analysis of the Secret Network ~$4.67M security incident.
Future strategy and roadmap: Common Prefix plans to extend formal verification to more major chains and DeFi protocols and to keep publishing security research and incident post-mortems.
Dionysis Zindros — Co-founder & CEO; Stanford postdoc and University of Athens PhD, former Google, Twitter and IOHK engineer, co-invented OpenBazaar.
Nikolaos Kamarinakis — Co-founder & CTO; focuses on interoperability and smart contract auditing, represented Greece at the European Cyber Security Challenge three years running.
Zeta Avarikioti — Co-founder & Chief Scientist; assistant professor at TU Wien with a PhD from ETH Zurich, received the 2025 Hedy Lamarr Prize.
Apostolos Tzinas — Co-founder & Product Lead; focuses on consensus protocols and DeFi research.
Haris Karavasilis — COO; formerly at Amazon and Piraeus Bank, oversees finance, legal and marketing.