Meet Christian Matt from #TeamConcordium Germany

Published in

Concordium

3 min readJul 28, 2020

Team Concordium brings together outstanding researchers, software engineers and business leaders from all over the world and we are proud to introduce them to the rest of our community. Today we would like you to meet Christian Matt.

Who are you?

I grew up in a small village in Germany called Böhl-Iggelheim. After studying computer science and mathematics in Karlsruhe, I moved to Zurich in Switzerland to pursue a PhD in cryptography. I then moved to California to continue research at a university, and finally came back to Zurich to join Concordium as a researcher.

Why are you interested in Blockchain?

Blockchain is one of the few areas in which state-of-the art research is turned into products. This is exciting for me as a researcher who is used to work on theoretical questions that only may turn out to be useful in the distant future.

How can the world benefit from Blockchain?

Blockchain technology eliminates the need for a trusted party in many applications. This not only has the potential to reduce cost, by cutting out the middlemen, but also allows to move toward a more decentralized and democratic world.

How did you get involved in Concordium?

While I had been working on cryptography for several years, my research had nothing to do with Blockchain, and I was initially rather skeptical about it. I then started to become more interested with the emergence of privacy-preserving and energy-efficient proof-of-stake protocols. I learned about Concordium through the involvement of two professors I already knew: Ueli Maurer was my PhD advisor and Jesper Buus Nielsen was visiting ETH Zurich for a couple of months while I was there.

What would you like to see Blockchain doing in the future?

I would like to see some cool applications using smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs that go beyond a simple cryptocurrency to be employed in the real world, usable for everyone.

If you could describe Concordium in 2 words, which ones would it be?

Business blockchain.

Why should everyone closely follow Blockchain’s journey?

After the initial hype, Blockchain is still in its infancy. It is currently a very exciting time for blockchain, and we will only see its true potential in the future. Maybe it will be ubiquitous in a few years and used for applications nobody imagines today. It will therefore be interesting to follow this journey and understand future developments.