Welcome to the IOTA Foundation

‌Aleksei Korolev

Aleksei joins the IOTA Ecosystem team as a Technical Writer. A Russian immigrant, he lives in Munich, Germany. As Aleksei was working as a tool programmer in the educational technology industry, he changed his career to writing documentation. Aleksei holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

A month before I joined IOTA, I knew distributed ledger technologies only in a form of cryptocurrency — and deemed it a mass lunacy, a tulip mania of today. I changed my mind since then: distributed ledgers are to shake the world, and they are shaking it already. The new technology changes trade and banking and our approach to censorship, corruption, and politics. A rare invention is inherently good or bad. The atomic fission prevented the Third World War over the Europe — with the cost of public fear. We cannot un-invent the atomic bomb, and we cannot un-invent any other discovery. What we can do, however, is to foresee and embrace the change. For that the society needs an informed opinion, both on the technology in general and on the specific applications of it. My daily grind produces exactly that — accurate information for the public — so I choose to stay at IOTA.

Holger (Phylo)

Holger joins the Ecosystem team as a Community Manager. In this role, he will focus on Community Governance projects and enabling a growing IOTA Community Ecosystem. He will work together with our Community Manager Antonio Nardella in strengthening the connection and relations between community members and the IOTA Foundation. For the potential IOTA Treasury/DAO, he will function as a bridge between the community and the IOTA Foundation by relaying community decisions to the Foundation. Holger has a background in the chemical industry and in customer relationships.

My role in the Foundation emerged out of my engagement in several Community projects in the last year that included a huge engagement in the X-Teams, the Firefly Beta-Testing, the community Treasury Project and the Community Wiki. As I contributed to the Community Treasury project as a community member myself, I am well aware of the expectations and directions chosen by the community and are happy to ensure that this project gets all the support it deserves.

Matthew Maxwell

Matthew joins the IOTA Firefly team as a Full Stack Engineer. In this role, he will focus on maintaining and extending the wallet’s functionality. Matthew lives in Austin, Texas, and recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. Through academic study and internship involvement, he has gained experience with a variety of projects including applications of both traditional and modern web-based stacks, C++ desktop environments, and more.

I am absolutely thrilled to be working for the IOTA Foundation on building revolutionary technology for a collectively better future. It has been fascinating to follow the progress of the foundation and the projects that form the IOTA ecosystem, and it is beyond exciting to imagine a decentralized future powered by all of it. I am grateful to be a part of the team, organization, and community realizing this grand vision together!

Philipp Gackstatter

Philipp joins the IOTA Identity team as a Rust Software Engineer. In this role he will focus on further developing the IOTA Identity framework in Rust. Philipp lives in Berlin, Germany, and will soon be graduating from TU Vienna with a master’s degree in Software Engineering & Internet Computing. Alongside his studies, he worked with the latest technologies in the automotive and cloud computing industries. The Rust programming language was the catalyst for him to discover his passion for systems engineering and programming languages.

The IOTA identity library sparked my interest – but not only because it was written in Rust. As a believer in the importance of privacy, the idea of giving users full control over their digital identities and how that data is shared sounded very appealing to me. In a world where a few players accumulate ever-growing amounts of our data, this can be the antidote. I am thus thrilled to be joining the talented team at IOTA to help make this vision a reality.

We are very happy to officially announce that Aleksei Korolev, Matthew Maxwell, Philipp Gackstatter, Holger (Phylo) have joined the IOTA Foundation! Give them all a very warm welcome!