Leonhard Balduf

Bio

Leonhard Balduf got his B.Sc. in Munich in 2016. His thesis on distributing computational tasks for stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) was written while visiting the Bewersdorf Lab at Yale University.

He did his M.Sc. in computer science at HU Berlin and finished in 2021, having spent multiple semesters abroad, in the USA, Russia, and South Korea.

Leonhard Balduf is now a researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Weizenbaum Institute, in a research group focused on trust in distributed environments.

Research Interests

His research interests are focused on peer-to-peer and decentralized systems and many problems of efficient solutions in computer science. He particularly focuses on the intersection of technology and the society.

The years 2021 to 2023 were mostly filled with research on the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS). He was able to show major issues in privacy and trust in the system, as well as investigate decentralization and the spread of potentially malicious content.

In 2024, Leonhard published the first comprehensive work on Bluesky, a novel distributed social network, which has seen major uptake since then.