François-Xavier Wicht

PhD student

Research statement

I’m a PhD student in the Cryptology and Data Security Group at the University of Bern. My research focuses on the privacy aspects of digital currencies.

Initially, my primary concern is the development of formal definitions to assess and compare the privacy guarantees offered by various systems. This encompasses decentralized and permissionless schemes, as well as centrally managed digital currencies. Additionally, I am committed to designing cryptosystems that can provably achieve these privacy guarantees or introduce innovative privacy properties.

Beyond the technical aspects, my research extends into interdisciplinary collaboration between cryptography and law. Ultimately, my goal is to contribute to the protection of individual freedoms while mitigating potential criminal activities in the realm of digital currencies.

Talks

• A Formal Evaluation of Privacy in Monero, Monerokon 2023
• A Comparison of Privacy-Enhancing Mechanisms in Blockchain, DEBS 2023
• The Multiple Faces of Privacy in Blockchain, Cuso Winter School 2024
• A Transaction-Level Model for Blockchain Privacy, Financial Cryptography 2024
• A Scalable Privacy-Preserving Payment Scheme, IC3 Winter Retreat 2025
• How Privacy Impacts Storage In Cryptocurrency, BSA Conference EPFL 2025
• Toxic Decoys: A Path to Private Blockchain Scalability, BSA Conference EPFL 2025

Teaching

• Fall Semester 2023: Diskrete Mathematik
• Fall Semester 2024: Distributed Algorithms

Publications

1. Cachin, C., & Wicht, F.-X. Toxic Decoys: A Path to Scaling Privacy-Preserving Cryptocurrencies. Proceedings of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2025(4).
2. Wicht, F.-X., Wang, Z., Le, D. V., & Cachin, C. (2025). A Transaction-Level Model for Blockchain Privacy. In J. Clark & E. Shi (Eds.), Proc. 28th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2024) (Vol. 14745). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78679-2_16
3. de Laage, R., Yuhala, P., Wicht, F.-X., Felber, P., Cachin, C., & Schiavoni, V. (2025). Practical Secure Aggregation by Combining Cryptography and Trusted Execution Environments. Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems, DEBS 2025, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 10-13, 2025.