Jacob joined the ISE research group in August 2015 after graduating from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he focussed on cloud computing and theoretical finance. Jacob successfully defended his dissertation in 2021 with the topic "Scalable Privacy-preserving Off-chain Computations".

Jacob's research focuses on novel concepts and approaches in distributed systems design with contributions in cloud computing, blockchains, and decentralized application architectures. He develops novel approaches to improve blockchain's scalability and privacy through off-chaining, and applies them to relevant ecosystem problems in different application domains, e.g., energy and finance. As part of his research, he created ZoKrates, a language, and toolbox for zkSNARKs on Ethereum. ZoKrates won a best paper award, a $70000 Samsung Next Stack Zero grant, and its ongoing development is supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

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