At this year’s NTMS conference in Paris, France, Fabian Knirsch presented the work of Andreas Unterweger, Fabian Knirsch, Dominik Engel and Christoph Leixnering about “Lessons Learned from Implementing a Privacy-Preserving Smart Contract in Ethereum”.

The authors present a real-world use case allowing customers in a diverse market to find optimum (cheap) energy tariffs. The privacy-preserving matching between customer forecasts and utility provider templates is implemented as a smart contract in the public Ethereum blockchain.

In this paper, we are the first to implement such a privacy-preserving protocol from the energy domain as a smart contract in Ethereum. We elaborate on and present our implementation as well as our practical findings, including more or less subtle traps and pitfalls.