We talk with Mahnush Movahedi of DFINITY to explain the fundamental innovation behind DFINITY's consensus system. She explains how threshold relay works, how groups are determined in consensus, and how cryptographic deterministic randomness drive consensus as a fast and light-weight substitute for Proof of Work. We learn about how this impacts the architecture for state and network protocol design. This episode really shows why Mahnush, a PhD Yale postdoctoral computer scientist with a focus on multiparty computation, would choose DFINITY as the project to join to innovate on consensus protocols. https://dfinity.org/scholarships - DFINITY Scholarship Program https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04548 - DFINITY Consensus System