Beside talks and discussions, there will be two workshops at TangleCon 2023. Some weeks ago, we already talked with Marco Besier about his session on NFTs. DTL developer Arthur Pichl will explain the basics of working with IOTA in his workshop and apply them together with the participants.
Please tell something about your background.
I went to a school with a focus on strong musical education and played the cello, piano and guitar during my school years. But already during these years, I noticed a great interest in natural sciences and technologies. Soon I started to play around with computer components and hardware in general. After graduating from high school, I went to university to study molecular biology – however, during my studies, I noticed how I was drawn back to the technology sector. Over the last years, I gained a lot of experiences with programming. Around that time, I had my first contact with Bitcoin and the crypto market in general. In 2021, I programmed and founded my culture web platform frey-tag.at in Vienna and since 2022 I am working as a Web3 developer at byte5.
How did you get interested in IOTA?
I first started to get interested in IOTA in late 2017 when it had its first massive bull run. Back then, I was carried away by the general market sentiment about IOTA and its promises, but hadn’t yet fully understood the potential of IOTA and the Tangle. But soon I started to really understand the underlying technology and its visions. Since then, I kept up to date with IOTA, the community and its technologies and I still get fascinated when I learn about new opportunities and possible implementations of IOTA.
What are you currently working on?
Our team at byte5 is currently working on making Web3 and its advantages more accessible to a wider audience and users, but at the moment I can't really reveal more than that.
What will you be talking about at TangleCon?
At this year's TangleCon, I will be holding a workshop on "IOTA for beginners". The goal of this workshop is to make crypto and especially IOTA and its underlying technologies more easily accessible and understandable for everyone.
What is the biggest topic for you in the community right now?
I think in general the biggest topic has been and will be Coordicide. There are a lot of topics like digital identities, smart contracts and EVM which are not only very interesting but also important, but Coordicide is probably the next big technological step for IOTA and a major achievement to strengthen the trust towards the IOTA Foundation.
What is the biggest challenge in the industry at the moment?
Probably the current and especially the perceived state of the crypto market. Especially for people who are less involved in crypto, all the headlines about "get rich quick schemes" and scams had a big effect, which has not only decreased the confidence of the people towards crypto, but also in general the whole market is often disparaged as a speculative instrument and the underlying technologies are not perceived at all.
What are your hopes for IOTA in the future?
My biggest hope is that IOTA and the entire crypto market in general slowly grows out of its current “infancy” state and starts to come into its own with adoption into our daily lives and problem-solving applications. Also, of course, I hope for a successful implementation of IOTA 2.0 and the accompanying Coordicide.
Dear Arthur, thanks for the interview. See you at TangleCon!
