Serguei Popov Joins the IOTA Foundation's Supervisory Board

Serguei Popov, one of the founding members of the IOTA Foundation, is joining the Foundation’s Supervisory Board, the body responsible for the general oversight and guidance of the IOTA Foundation. In taking this long-planned move, he steps down from his current role as a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors.

In moving to the Supervisory Board, Serguei joins fellow board members Clint Walker, General Counsel at Barclays Bank Delaware, and Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Object Management Group, Inc.

Serguei decided to join the Supervisory Board and leave his current role because the most pressing research questions, which have demanded his immediate involvement in the IOTA Foundation, have been answered and he now wants to refocus on his academic career. He commented: “The reasons for this move are simple: scientifically, I have given all I could give to IOTA, and now the research problems to which I could de facto contribute are essentially solved from the theoretical point of view.”

Serguei has already handed over management of the IOTA research department to William Sanders in February last year, leaving him free to focus on managerial oversight rather than day-to-day decisions and responsibilities. (Read more about William’s appointment here).

Serguei Popov (Ph.D. in mathematics, 1997, Moscow State University) is a research mathematician specializing in probability theory and stochastic processes. His involvement in the crypto sphere dates back to 2013 when he was involved in the community around Nxt, the open-source cryptocurrency and payment network.

Serguei wrote the first whitepaper on the IOTA Tangle, which became the foundational basis of the IOTA vision. He officially joined the Foundation in 2015 as co-founder before joining the Board of Directors in 2018. Serguei was also a leading force behind the IOTA Foundation’s research department (officially heading it as Director of Research from late 2019), which today is one of the leading research groups in the field of DAG-based (directed acyclic graph) distributed ledger technology, with strong ties to the international academic community; find out more about the IOTA Foundation’s research department here.

Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation, said: “While we will all miss Serguei’s daily involvement and inspirational guidance in the IOTA Foundation, I’m extremely grateful that he will continue to support us in his new role on our Supervisory Board. IOTA owes a huge debt of gratitude to Serguei, and we are tremendously encouraged that he is confident that we have solved the most pressing research challenges so that he can take a step back from his demanding role. Here’s to many more adventures with him in the future.”

Commenting on this new development, Serguei said: “I’m happy that my mission at the IOTA Foundation is complete and that its Research Department continues to grow from strength to strength under the excellent leadership of William Sanders, leaving me free to return fully to my academic career (while I still can) and exchange the craziness of the crypto space for academia. Nevertheless, rest assured that I remain convinced of IOTA’s mission, and joining the Supervisory Board of the IOTA Foundation permits me to still be around and be of help, in case it is needed. I would like to take this occasion to express my profound gratitude to all people who shared this IOTA journey with me, from the very start to the present.”

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