Professor Prateek Saxena Honoured with ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award for Pioneering Research in Blockchain Consensus

A Decade of Impact: Professor Prateek Saxena Honoured with ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award for Pioneering Research in Blockchain Consensus:

Professor Prateek Saxena from the National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Computing has been awarded the ACM CCS 2025 Test-of-Time Award for the paper “Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer”, authored with Loi Luu, Jason Teutsch, and Raghav Kulkarni. This prestigious award recognises research that has had a profound and enduring influence on the field of blockchain and decentralised systems.

Published in 2015, the paper challenged a foundational assumption in Satoshi Nakamoto’s design: that “a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes.” Instead, the authors argued that nodes are rational rather than inherently honest, and that without proper incentives, full nodes have little reason to verify blocks they did not mine—a phenomenon they called the verifier’s dilemma.

The work proposed several “naive but elegant” solutions, including a probabilistic verification model, which sparked a decade of research into scalable, incentive-aligned blockchain verification. The paper, which started as a theoretical critique, has now become a core pillar of blockchain scalability.

The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) is one of the most prestigious venues for cybersecurity research. Its Test-of-Time Award celebrates landmark contributions whose impact continues to shape the field a decade after publication.

This year, NUS researchers won two out of the three Test-of-Time Awards — a remarkable recognition of the university’s sustained leadership in producing research that drives real-world innovation and stands the test of time.

👉 Read more about Professor Reza Shokri’s award-winning work here.
👉 Learn more about the ACM CCS Test-of-Time Awards here.