François-Xavier Wicht

PhD student

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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.

More information is available on my personal page.

Teaching

• Fall Semester 2023: Diskrete Mathematik
• Fall Semester 2024: Distributed Algorithms
• Spring Semester 2026: Privacy and Data Security

Bachelor and Master thesis

Besides the list of available thesis topics, I stand available to discuss interesting ideas and supervise potential thesis topics.

Publications

1. Cachin, C., & Wicht, F.-X. (2025). Toxic Decoys: A Path to Scaling Privacy-Preserving Cryptocurrencies. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2025(4), 926–943. https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2025-0165
2. 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. Proc. Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS), 152–163. https://doi.org/10.1145/3701717.3730543
3. 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