Dr. Friedhelm Victor

I study how much anonymity decentralized financial systems actually provide to their users, what undermines it, and how analysis methods in this space can be put on a rigorous scientific footing.

My work combines empirical measurement, graph analytics and security research, including:

• Evaluating the anonymity of blockchain users, e.g., privacy risks from off-chain cues (PETS ‘26) and in the Lightning Network (FC ‘21)
• Measurement of peer-to-peer networks, e.g., anomalous peers that threaten user privacy in Monero’s P2P network (AFT ‘26)
• Privacy properties of cryptocurrencies, from address clustering in Ethereum (FC ‘20) to privacy-focused systems such as Monero, e.g., wallet implementations (ICBC ‘24) and decentralized P2P exchanges (FC Workshops ‘25)
• Financial crime detection, e.g., wash trading (WWW ‘21) and pump-and-dump schemes (ICDMW ‘19)
• Graph analytics for complex financial networks (KDD ‘21, NeurIPS ‘22 Datasets & Benchmarks)

I enjoy supervising students: several master’s theses I supervised have turned into publications, most recently at PETS and AFT. Students interested in a thesis on these topics are welcome to reach out about external co-supervision together with an advisor at their institution. I have co-organized the Cryptoasset Analytics Workshop (CAAW) every year since its first edition in 2022.

I received my doctoral degree (summa cum laude) from TU Berlin in 2022. Before that, I completed a dual master’s degree in Computer Science at TU Berlin and KAIST, and a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute.