Current Position & Biography
Dimitris Karakostas is a cofounder and cryptography researcher at Common Prefix. His work concerns blockchain protocol design, game theory and the economic behavior of cryptocurrency systems. The company's biography identifies his contribution to the Edinburgh Decentralization Index and his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh under Aggelos Kiayias. His own professional CV distinguishes his ongoing Common Prefix work from an Edinburgh research-associate appointment that ended in November 2024. An October 2026 research publication lists his affiliation as Common Prefix in Athens, Greece.
Notable Contributions
Karakostas and Bernardo David coauthored StakeNote: A Proof-Of-Stake Protocol for CryptoNote Payments, published at AFT 2026. It combines the Ouroboros Praos consensus approach with CryptoNote's privacy-preserving payments. The paper establishes security and privacy guarantees for the construction under its stated framework and reports a proof-of-concept implementation of cryptographic components. It separately discusses heuristic extensions for privacy and participation. Those distinctions matter: a proved construction, a component benchmark and a proposed enhancement are different kinds of evidence, not interchangeable claims of production readiness.
Why Katharos.ai Is Following Them
Katharos.ai follows Karakostas because ledger security and transaction privacy can interact in ways that are easy to obscure with a single label. Proof of stake describes how participation influences consensus; it does not, by itself, specify what transaction information remains exposed. Work that combines these layers provides a concrete basis for asking which guarantees compose and which assumptions still need to be checked independently.
Areas to Follow
We will follow the boundaries between formal results and heuristic changes, how implementations preserve privacy properties, and what additional evidence appears beyond component-level experiments. Another editorial focus is how research measures decentralization instead of treating it as a yes-or-no characteristic. These questions concern protocol evaluation, not predictions about a token's value or endorsements of the company's clients.
Reporting Scope
Greece denotes his current published Athens research affiliation, not nationality or an assumption that all remote work occurs at company headquarters. The historical Edinburgh role is not used to infer a present UK base. Collaborative research is credited to its authors; this profile does not equate an academic proposal with a deployed or independently audited financial service.
Sources for Further Reading
https://www.commonprefix.com/team https://dimkarakostas.com/dimkarakostas.pdf https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.8
Photo Credit
Portrait of Dimitris Karakostas supplied on the Common Prefix team page. Photographer and rights holder are not identified in the original image metadata; public display is not an unrestricted reuse license. Whole photograph retained at native size and padded to 16:9 without cropping or facial alteration. Original metadata retained.
Editorial Disclaimer
This profile summarizes information from the cited sources. Katharos.ai does not endorse the subject or guarantee every source claim’s authenticity.