Ulrich Gallersdörfer

Ulrich is a researcher at the chair for Software Engineering of Business Information Systems (sebis) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since September 2017. He holds a master's degree in Information Systems from TUM and wrote his master thesis about Analysis of Use Cases of Blockchain Technology in Legal Transactions.

His research focuses on the data analytics of public Blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. Public Blockchains offer rich datasets, consisting of all transactions and smart contracts executed by the users of the respective platform. With this data, one can cluster addresses to users, detect mixing services disguising the origin of funds, trace cross-Blockchain transactions or find other user behaviour. He is especially interested in bytecode analytics of Ethereum Smart Contracts. Ethereum offers with over 5.6 Million Smart Contracts the richest set of decentralized applications, allowing a search for design patterns, developer behaviour or used standards.

Ulrich is also very engaged in the education with regards to Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies. He is the creator and main organizer of the lecture Blockchain-based Systems Engineering in the summer term. With this lecture, Ulrich supports students to get a technical foundation of different types of Blockchains and want them to be able to evaluate future developments in this area. After this course, students are able to design and implement own applications with Blockchain technology. Besides offering a lecture, Ulrich is responsible for the organization of the seminar Technical Analysis of Existing Blockchain Applications in winter term. Additionally, Ulrich is the scientific advisor to a number of students with regard to their bachelor's and master's thesis or their guided research.

Besides his activity at the chair, he is also a speaker at various events about Blockchain. He gives talks at international conferences, at companies like Allianz or IBM, but also at other universities and occasions. He participated in the Omega Tau Science Podcast about Blockchain and Smart Contracts. If you are interested in him giving a talk at your event, please leave him a mail.

In his free time, Ulrich likes to participate in Hackathons. He won the Hyperfit Blockchain Hackathon in Copenhagen in August 2017 and the IBM Blockchain Hackathon in Munich in November 2017. He talked about the complexities of Bitcoin at the Blockchain4.Business hackathon and was also a member of jury at the famous ETHBerlin in September 2018.

Research Projects

His reserach projects include:

• Smart Contract Data Analytics: Data is broadly available in public Blockchains. Bitcoin stores about 180 Gb with a monthly growth rate of 3 Gb, Ethereum stores about 100 Gb with growing 8Gb per month. This data allows us to take a deep dive in the ecosystems of such Blockchains. In this research project we investigate the usage of Smart Contracts in Ethereum.
• Digital Legacy and Provision Platform: Legacy does not only affect objects in the real world, but also any "digital-only" asset like Facebook-Accounts or Cryptocurrency-Wallets. As maintaining an offline-storage for passwords and private keys is time-consuming and error-prone, other solutions to digital legacy have to be found. In cooperation with the Notarkammer Bayern and the Bundesnotarkammer, we design and implement a new approach for the management and storage of digital legacy, such that information can be stored in an easy and secure manner.
• On/Off-Chain Verification of Claims: Data on the Blockchain created by regular processes of this Blockchain are verified as the result of a successful consensus-mechanism. These processes are e.g. regular transactions, new proposed blocks or the correct execution of a Smart Contract. However, all these data follow a predefined scheme (for example, you can only spend the money you have) and are easy to verify. However, this verification does not work for statements or data about the real world, as the Blockchain is not able to generate data about the real world, but is only able to handle data inserted by external services like Oracles. This introduces a single point of failure, as the entities relying on this data stored "onchain" are entirely dependent on the Oracle itself. We research a way to securely store and verify data which has been placed on chain, first by external applications and later with Smart Contracts to enable automation.
• Blockchain Certificates: Certificates from many universities are currently paper-based, attackers are able to manipulate their results and lie to companies or state. We are researching a method to enable the secure storage and verification of certificates. The users should be able to allow access to their certificates for other entities to validate. Additionally, we look at special cases like certificate revokation or updates.

Selected Invited Talks & Presentations

• "Blockchain löst (vermutlich) leider nicht deine Probleme – eine Einführung in alltägliche Missverständnisse", 19th December 2019, Daidalos-Kolloquium, LMU
• "Identitätsmanagement in Blockchain-basierten Systemen", 29th July 2019, Landesgruppe Bayern: Blockchain Stammtisch #5, Bundesblock
• "Blockchains – Funktionsweise, Chancen und Risiken", 28th March 2019, Studieninformationstag der Fakultät für Informatik, Technische Universität München
• "Mining the Ethereum Blockchain: Looking under the Hood of Deployed Smart Contracts", 13th December 2018, Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM)
• "A Deep Dive into Bitcoin", 18th July 2018, Blockchain4.BusinessHackathon
• "Kryptowährungen, Blockchain & Smart Contracts, was erwartet uns in Zukunft?", 20th June 2018, Kölner WiFa
• "Boom der Kryptowährungen", 26th April 2018, Zündfunk @ Bayern 2, Recording, from minute 22:00
• "Analysis of Requirements for Blockchain Applications", 23th April 2018, @ fortiss Blockchain course
• "Sprechstunde: Blockchain", 10th April 2018, @ Euroforum, Best of Blockchain
• "Blockchain / Kryptowährung – Was kommt mit Bitcoin und Co auf uns zu?", 1st March 2018, @ Continental Arena Regensburg, ECOVIS ChancenWelt Digitalisierung
• "Blockchain und Bitcoin, was ist das?", 14th December 2017, @ Hochschule Furtwangen, Report
• "Massive Munich Mobility Package - A new era of mobility", 25th November 2017, Winning Solution @ IBM / Münchner Kreis Hackathon, see Report
• "Blockchain & Smart Contracts - Dem Hype folgen?", 12th October, 2017, @ msg.group Roundtable, see Slides
• "TimberTrack - Tamper-Proof Supply Chains in Timber Tracking", 18th August, 2017, Winning Solution @ Hyperfit Blockchain Hackathon, see Report
• "Blockchains und Smart Contracts", 10th July, 2017, @ omega tau Podcast, see Recording
• "Risks of Blockchain Technology", 24th February, 2017, @ IRIS2017, see Report

Publications (in reverse chronological order)

2020

• Gallersdörfer, U., Klaaßen, L., and Stoll, C. (2020). Energy Consumption of Cryptocurrencies Beyond Bitcoin. Joule 4.9 (2020): 1843-1846.

• Gallersdörfer, U., & Matthes, F. (2020). Towards Valid Use Cases: Requirements and Supporting Characteristics of Proper Blockchain Applications. 2020 Seventh International Conference on Software Defined Systems (SDS). IEEE, 2020.

• Gallersdörfer, U., & Matthes, F. (2020). AuthSC: Mind the Gap between Web and Smart Contracts. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.14033.

• Sillaber, C., Waltl, B., Treiblmaier, H., Gallersdörfer, U., & Felderer, M. (2020). Laying the foundation for smart contract development: an integrated engineering process model. Information Systems and e-Business Management, 1-20.

2019

• Stoll, C., Klaaßen, L., & Gallersdörfer, U.: The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin. Joule.

• Waltl, B., Sillaber, C., Gallersdörfer, U., & Matthes, F.: Blockchains and Smart Contracts: A Threat for the Legal Industry?. In Business Transformation through Blockchain (pp. 287-315). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

• Hefele, A., Gallersdörfer, U., & Matthes, F. (2019, October). Library Usage Detection in Ethereum Smart Contracts. In OTM Confederated International Conferences" On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems" (pp. 310-317). Springer, Cham.

2018

• Sillaber, C., Gallersdörfer, U., Waltl, B., Felderer, M., & Treiblmaier, H.: Toward an integrated process model for smart contract engineering. In Pre-ICIS Workshop on Blockchain and Smart Contract (pp. 82-86).

• Gallersdörfer, U. and Matthes, F.: Tamper-Proof Volume Tracking in Supply Chains with Smart Contracts. European Conference on Parallel Processing. Springer, Cham, 2018.

2017

• Gallersdörfer, U.: Analysis of Use Cases of Blockchain Technology in Legal Transactions Master's Thesis: Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany, 2017.