Welcome to the IOTA Foundation – March 2022

Viera Zuborova

Viera joins the IOTA Foundation as a Grant Writer in the Market Adoption team. In this position, Viera will develop project proposals and ideas that open new streams and ways for cross-sector collaborations between industry and academia, private and public bodies. Her main goal is to identify those streams, channels, and ideas that have the potential for social change in the blockchain ecosystem. Viera lives in Berlin with a background in political science and is a passionate social researcher. In the past, she worked as an executive director of a research think tank, and previously as an associate professor and head of the department of political science. She joins the IOTA Foundation because she is interested in working in a community that not only sees the future trends but is living them.

IOTA and its growing community are promoting a new way to realize our human ideals and are bringing radical structural changes in our societies. They have a positive influence and play a significant role in the engagement of people.

Kevin Mayrhofer

Kevin joins the IOTA Foundation as a Developer Advocate in the Ecosystem team. In this role, he will focus on the developer experience. Kevin lives in South Tyrol, Italy, and is a well-known community developer, especially for his work on the Wiki. In recent years, he has worked in the areas of rehabilitation robotics, HPC, machine learning, and computer vision and has led a small research team.

When I was working on an IoT project for a friend in 2017, I discovered IOTA. At first, I was more of a silent listener, but was soon inspired by the community and started to get more involved, and tried to learn everything I could about the project. I started to join different community initiatives, like the dRNG setup, the SpamClub team, and most recently the Wiki.  But basically, I joined the dark side because they have cookies. ;)

Oluwapelumi Ajayi

Oluwapelumi is joining the IOTA Foundation as a Software Engineer in the Client Libraries team. In this role, he will focus on building easy-to-use and advanced client libraries in collaboration with various teams. Pelumi lives in Nigeria and has experience with a variety of protocols for embedded devices and payment applications.

I had always wondered how DLTs could fit into devices big and small regardless of computational power and form factor, and to discover that IOTA is actively solving that exact problem makes it so exciting to join the foundation. I look forward to building a future of truly open, scalable and decentralized DLT at IOTA.

Matjaž Verbole

Matjaž joins the IOTA Foundation as a Software Engineer in the Engineering team. In this role, he will focus on the IOTA libraries for embedded devices. Matjaž lives in Maribor, Slovenia, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer and Information Science. He has more than 8 years of working experience in business software development and firmware development in various fields. He specialized in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication where security and reliability come first. Matjaž joins the foundation because he has an open-source mindset, is interested in distributed and decentralized systems and likes being part of a successful story.

In an age of increasing globalization, users of services are from all over the world. So one of the most important and major aspects of a system is its scalability. The bottleneck of traditional blockchains is exactly that: scalability. This is where IOTA comes into play with a revolutionary type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) called Tangle, rather than the traditional blockchain model. This new technology promises high scalability, no fees, and near-instant transfers. I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to develop and work with such amazing and future-proof technology.

Jeroen van den Hout

Jeroen is joining the Ecosystem team as a Developer Advocate. He is a long-time community member and has been part of the X-Teams and quite a few other community efforts recently, such as the IOTA Wiki. In his role, he will help improve the developer experience within the IOTA ecosystem. He lives in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and besides being an airline pilot, he studied Business Administration at the VU University in Amsterdam and was involved in several software development projects in green mobility and analytics.

In search of alternatives to blockchain solutions, I discovered the IOTA project in 2017. The welcoming community and their technological adventure got me hooked instantly. Through them, I learned about cryptography, decentralized systems and community development. In return, I felt obliged to learn as much as I could to be able to help others to the best of my ability. I am grateful for this opportunity to continue this journey at the IOTA Foundation.

Thomas Pototschnig

Thomas joins the IOTA Foundation as a Senior System Operations Engineer and is taking over responsibility for the mainnet infrastructure. In this role, he will improve the existing infrastructure and make sure that everything works smoothly. Thomas lives in Munich and worked as a Linux server administrator for almost 11 years on a project with more than 700 Linux servers (as of now) - the last 4 years as the main person in charge. He also has a strong hardware development background and has been known in the IOTA community for his contributions (PiDiver, FPGA CryptoCore, Chrysalis Ledger Nano App) since 2018.

When I first heard about IOTA in mid-2017, I was immediately excited because the scaling problems of other cryptocurrencies were already more than clear at that time and IOTA had a completely novel approach. I started - for fun - with PiDiver in April 2018 and slipped into the community, in which I have been active ever since and have always felt very comfortable. And so the next step was obvious: to make my passion my profession. I am looking forward to the upcoming challenges and cooperation with the IOTA Foundation!

We are very happy to officially announce that Viera Zuborova, Kevin Mayrhofer, Oluwapelumi Ajayi, Matjaž Verbole, Jeroen van den Hout and  Thomas Pototschnig have joined the IOTA Foundation! Give them all a very warm welcome!

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