Research @ExaAILabs building the best embedding models in the world. | prev phd @cornell_cs
Joined May 2012
- Tweets 558
- Following 2,036
- Followers 710
- Likes 5,465
30 Photos and videos
Benjamin Chan retweeted
May 20
And lastly, thank you to all Exa users and friends who've been with us these past 5 years.
We will not stop until the world’s information is fully organized for you, and for every intelligence across the world 🫡
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
Feb 12
Introducing Exa Instant: the first sub-200ms search engine.
Faster than Google, it's custom built to power realtime AI products like chat and voice.
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11 Dec 2025
Excited to see Simplex powering practical onchain payments!
9 Dec 2025
We'll be talking more about this but TL;DR Tempo runs Commonware's variant of Simplex using threshold sigs, which unlocks primitives:
- secure randomness
- threshold enc/decryption
- random next leader election
- simple bridges to other chains
- offline tx verification
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11 Dec 2025
The protocol is dear to me; it's so elegant, fast, easy.
I maintain that one day Simplex Consensus will be the byzantine protocol of choice everywhere (industry, in distributed systems classes).
simplex.blog/
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
24 Nov 2025
Introducing Exa 2.1
We scaled our pre-training and test-time compute by an order of magnitude, unlocking frontier search API performance for both fast and agentic search.
Deep dive below:
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10 Oct 2025
what a time to be here
10 Oct 2025
Introducing Exa 2.0
Breakthroughs in our AI research and engineering have enabled us to build both the fastest search API (<350ms) and the highest quality search on the market.
Product and technical deep dive below:
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
18 Jul 2025
Decentralized thoughts on 2 round BFT in Simplex style
With @ElodinStorm and Ling Ren
decentralizedthoughts.github…
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21 May 2025
The underlying consensus is based on Simplex Consensus! It's pretty cool to see.
simplex.blog
1/ Introducing the largest Solana Protocol change ever: Alpenglow, Solana's new consensus protocol conceived by the Anza Research team. Say goodbye to Tower BFT and Proof of History. Say hello to Votor & Rotor 🧵👇
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
11 Dec 2024
Unlike other “off-the-shelf” consensus implementations, consensus::simplex is refreshingly minimal.
It delivers simple agreement over opaque “blobs”. Functions that have historically motivated developers to create forks, like block broadcast, are abstracted as interfaces:
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
11 Dec 2024
Today, we are excited to share our biggest release yet: consensus::simplex (our first of many upcoming consensus dialects).
consensus::simplex provides BFT agreement via a new, optimistically responsive construction inspired by Simplex Consensus:
eprint.iacr.org/2023/463
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10 Jun 2024
A very cool way to scale up a consensus protocol like Simplex without having to connect to 5000-person committees
10 Jun 2024
Vena: Optimistically Responsive Consensus Over Large Validator Sets
hackmd.io/@patrickogrady/ven…
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
26 Mar 2024
For the latest Systems Seminar, @Vervious joins us to present Simplex Consensus.
Simplex has one goal: to be the simplest consensus protocol to prove, implement, and learn. Check it out here:
🔗 youtu.be/fQl9cnIjs7E
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
12 Apr 2023
Discover new consensus protocols with our faculty Prof. Rafael Pass and PhD student Benjamin Chan @Vervious from Cornell. Don't miss out their latest cutting-edge research in #blockchain #consensus!
12 Apr 2023
We have a new consensus protocol for you, called "Simplex Consensus". It's supposed to be fast and easier to understand than everything else out there. Joint work with Rafael Pass. Check it out at eprint.iacr.org/2023/463! 1/3
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12 Apr 2023
We have a new consensus protocol for you, called "Simplex Consensus". It's supposed to be fast and easier to understand than everything else out there. Joint work with Rafael Pass. Check it out at eprint.iacr.org/2023/463! 1/3
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12 Apr 2023
It builds on a ton of other protocols (Casper FFG, Hotstuff, Algorand, Streamlet, etc.). I think we're approaching the final evolution of consensus. 2/3
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13 Apr 2023
You can also find a summarized version at simplex.blog. Feedback and comments appreciated! 3/3
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
31 Mar 2023
#ePrint Simplex Consensus: A Simple and Fast Consensus Protocol: BY Chan, R Pass ia.cr/2023/463
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
12 Feb 2022
#ePrint Cosmic Security: B Chan, C Freitag, R Pass ia.cr/2022/156
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Benjamin Chan retweeted
26 Aug 2021
I know this is top secret information that you don’t normally share, but try opening your heart and tell me which coffee shops are perfect for reading and writing papers (around the world). I will bookmark this thread forever.
I’ll start: Here’s an option for when in Tel Aviv👇
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