The Significance
Why the room needs them.
Moritz Platt is a Capital Markets Technology Manager at Google and a Visiting Fellow at King's College London, which awarded him a PhD on reputation-based consensus in August 2025. He has co-written Google Cloud's published accounts of Deutsche Börse Group's cloud-native trading engine and of a DZ BANK oracle architecture for decentralised applications. He spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as a panellist on “How Institutions Actually Access Tokenised Assets”.
The Numbers
10 months
to build the cloud-native trading engine he and Deutsche Börse Group documented
3
properties, permissionlessness, Sybil attack resistance and freeness, that the 2024 trilemma paper he co-wrote shows no protocol can combine
40+
journals and conferences he reviews for, per King's College London
The Thesis · on the record
What Moritz believes about the next ten years.
01
No protocol gets all three
In a 2024 paper with Daniel Platt and Peter McBurney, he formalised permissionlessness, Sybil attack resistance and freeness, then showed that no blockchain protocol can achieve all three within that formalisation. The paper puts the result to designers as a trilemma to be balanced, not a gap to be closed.
02
Reputation did not close the gap
His King's thesis, awarded in August 2025, proposes a consensus mechanism combining proof-of-stake primitives with a reputation system, in pursuit of one person, one vote governance for permissionless networks. Its conclusion is negative: Sybil attacks on the mechanism can be prevented under relaxed conditions, such as when an attack is discoverable and the attackers identifiable, but not under generic ones.
03
Digital assets demand 24/7 operation
The Google Cloud post he co-wrote with Deutsche Börse Group's Ferudun Oezdemir states that 24/7 operations are required in digital assets to reduce execution risk, and that market participants also demand a choice of market access, including internet connectivity to trade at any time. The engine that post describes is instrument-agnostic and reached over a cloud-native internet API.
The Timeline
Years of shipping.
2018
Completes an MSc in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck, University of London, after a BSc at Technische Universität Berlin in 2014.
2019–2025
MPhil/PhD in the Department of Informatics, King's College London, ending in the thesis “Reputation-Based Consensus in Decentralised Systems” under Professor Peter McBurney.
2024
First author of “Sybil Attack Vulnerability Trilemma” with Daniel Platt and Peter McBurney, published 4 May in the International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems.
January 2025
Co-writes the Google Cloud account of Deutsche Börse Group's cloud-native trading engine with Ferudun Oezdemir, Head of AD Trading Core at Deutsche Börse Group.
October 2025
Sets out, with DZ BANK's Peter Kohl-Landgraf, a Google Cloud architecture for trustworthy oracle data, covering Confidential Space, SLSA Level 3 and ERC-6123 Smart Derivative Contracts.
June 2026
Panellist at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 on “How Institutions Actually Access Tokenised Assets”, Taostats Stage, 3 June.
In Their Words
Lines that keep proving correct.
“My work sits at the intersection of decentralised systems security and the broader challenge of creating fairness under adversarial conditions.”
His own website, mplatt.de, whose server returns a Last-Modified of 2 September 2026
“We demonstrate that no blockchain protocol can simultaneously achieve all three characteristics within the paradigm established by our formalisation. Thus, a trilemma emerges for distributed ledger technology designers, who must balance these characteristics thoughtfully.”
“Sybil Attack Vulnerability Trilemma”, Platt, Platt and McBurney, International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems 39(4), 4 May 2024
“In the world of digital assets, 24/7 operations are required to reduce execution risk. Market participants also demand choice of market access, including internet connectivity to execute trades anytime, anywhere.”
“Trading in the Cloud”, Google Cloud, 15 January 2025, co-written with Ferudun Oezdemir of Deutsche Börse Group
The Body of Work
What they have built, written, and backed.
Built
- “Trading in the Cloud”, with Deutsche Börse GroupGoogle Cloud post of 15 January 2025, co-written with Ferudun Oezdemir, Head of AD Trading Core at Deutsche Börse Group. It documents a cloud-native, instrument-agnostic trading engine built over ten months, with 24/7 availability and a cloud-native internet API for access, and presents it as one of the first major results of the 2023 partnership between Deutsche Börse Group and Google Cloud.
- “The oracles of DeFi”, with DZ BANKGoogle Cloud post of 2 October 2025, co-written with Peter Kohl-Landgraf, Digital Transformation Manager, Capital Markets at DZ BANK. It sets out an architecture for trustworthy oracle data using Confidential Space trusted execution environments with remote attestation, Binary Authorization at SLSA Level 3 and Private Service Connect. The worked example is the Smart Derivative Contract, an ERC-6123 protocol that DZ BANK had already tested on the Bundesbank Trigger Solution.
- “Reputation-Based Consensus in Decentralised Systems”PhD thesis, King's College London, awarded 1 August 2025, supervised by Professor Peter McBurney with Laurence Tratt and Daniele Magazzeni. It asks whether permissionless networks can be governed one person, one vote rather than plutocratically, proposes a mechanism combining proof-of-stake primitives with a reputation system, and finds that it resists Sybil attacks only under relaxed conditions.
- Frontiers research topic on institutional DLTTopic editor, with Francesco Pierangeli of the University of Birmingham and Karen Elliott of Birmingham Business School, for “Institutional distributed ledger technology (DLT): architectures, incentives and the transformation of digital infrastructure” in Frontiers in Blockchain. The topic is accepting submissions until 31 March 2027; he is listed there under his King's College London affiliation.
The next Proof of Talk is in Abu Dhabi.
Louvre Abu Dhabi, 3–4 December 2026. Admission is by application, and the room is capped at 2,000.
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