Q&A with Matt Roden
Tell us a bit about yourself and your background
I’m Matt Roden, Co-Founder and CTO of Evident Proof. In recent years, along with my team, I’ve spent much of my time focusing on creating secure, enterprise-grade, global cloud architectures at Berkshire Cloud, where I hold the same titles. More generally, I enjoy building solutions to big problems through the merging of innovative techniques and technical skills. This has led to me spending a large part of my career advising companies how to develop, structure, finance and implement technical strategy. I’m a developer at heart, but I get a lot of satisfaction from managing tech companies from launch through to something much bigger.
Tell us about your experience in blockchain and cryptocurrencies
Back in around 2014 I started to take an interest in Bitcoin and became excited about the imminent convergence of technologies including blockchain, the cloud, AI, cryptography, and IOT devices. Then when Ethereum’s blockchain was launched, I began thinking seriously about the ways all these technologies could be combined and harnessed to solve business problems.
How did this eventually lead to Evident Proof?
When I began considering the potential of these converging technologies with Adrian and the others in the Berkshire Cloud team, my ideas started to crystallise. We started focusing on the challenges businesses were facing as their business models became increasingly reliant on vast quantities of data. We then saw a clear opportunity to combine the skills we possessed as a team to develop a blockchain-based application that could immutably store evidence about the provenance of data. Developing this solution in partnership with Microsoft helped us a lot.
What are you responsible for at Evident Proof?
I’m the member of the team responsible for the overseeing the technological and strategic development of the Evident Proof platform. We’ve architected and built the platform to support business on a global scale, which means we must provide a high-demand, always-on service.
What’s the most exciting thing on the horizon for Evident Proof?
Most exciting about Evident Proof’s model is the potential to widely impact nearly every sector of 21st-century business operations. I’m a developer by training, though, and I realise that’s an exercise in navel gazing. What’s exciting for our customers is this new ability to protect the integrity of their data, and to manage who sees it and when. It’s exciting to see in real-world applications that our solution can bring truth and certainty to a vast data landscape. And it’s going to be particularly intriguing to observe how businesses derive value from the Evident Proof platform in new ways we hadn’t even anticipated.
What’s the most interesting thing happening in the wider market?
From voting, to healthcare, to commerce — there are many incredibly exciting blockchain applications out there. The challenge for companies is bringing the idea to market. We’re lucky at Evident Proof because we have a team with the technical and real-world experience to launch a global solution. Now we’re ready to see the effects of that solution on the broader business environment.
