By Parth Bhatt and Grace Pulliam

1. Tell me about yourself! What’s your background like?

I come from a computer science background. I studied Global Business and Blockchain Technology at the University of the Cumberlands for my second Masters after attending University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (UMassD) for my first Masters in Computer Science. I enjoy working for startups.

I have 5+ years of experience working in various domains and technologies. While working at Conventus as a Technology Solution Engineer, I gained hands-on experience dealing with the complexities of integrating different systems and maintaining a System of Record. That’s where I got familiar with Blockchain and multiparty communication for the first time, which led me to start exploring the field in more depth and ultimately to pursue my second Masters in Global Business and Blockchain Technology.
 
 
2. How did you end up joining MOBI? What can you tell me about your role as Technical Product Manager?

After completing my Masters in August 2021, I started looking for opportunities to work on Blockchain projects. While pursuing my Masters, I started exploring Blockchain-specific open source protocols, meetups, and communities. I have been following Baseline Protocol since then, which is how I met Andreas [Freund], who informed me about the MOBI Technical Product Manager role. While talking with Andreas to get to know more about MOBI, I found that my interests aligned well with what MOBI was doing. So that’s how I ended up joining MOBI!

In my role as a Technical Product Manager, I get the chance to understand business stakeholder requirements and communicate that information to the development team. In addition, I’m working to research and analyze the existing product landscape, which will help to shape and improve the development of Citopia and ITN products.

 
 
3. What can you tell me about the current state of development on Citopia and ITN products?

ITN Core services are pretty much stable. However, we are working on refining and adding automation scripts for adding/removing the new/existing nodes in/from the network. ITN members are reviewing the ITN Governance Framework, Decision Making process, exception, and dispute policies.

MOBI and its members are also working on building out Citopia, a decentralized platform designed to enable use cases for sustainable business automation. At present, the Citopia team is working on three pilots:

• Citopia partsTRAK: Designed to enable EV battery parts track and trace among suppliers, OEMs, dealers, logistics providers, and vehicle owners.
• Citopia MaaS: Users can plan Multimodal trips with seamless itinerary, ticketing, and payment on Citopia MaaS decentralized platform with the ITN as the trust anchor for identity management.
• Citopia vinTRAK: A dApp that enables automated processes to securely verify vehicle location using decentralized identities and zero-knowledge proofs.

 
 
4. Why should organizations join the ITN?

The ITN is a Federated Network. In other words, it’s a member-owned and operated protocol-agnostic digital infrastructure that provides the core trust services of governance, authority, identity, and assurance. Currently, organizations face challenges related to business automation, visibility of information, and identity management when trying to collaborate with other organizations on multiparty applications. The goal of the ITN is to enable interoperability by allowing organizations to develop decentralized applications (dApps) on top of the shared network that leverage decentralized identity and smart bilateral contracts to enable business automation and visibility of information while preserving user privacy.

By serving as the trusted infrastructure to allow organizations across all industries to create new revenue streams and reduce operational costs, the ITN will unlock countless opportunities for joint value creation.

Click here or watch the video below to learn more about the ITN!