Deepesh Kumar Nath has 11 years of combined back-end and mobile application development experience. He has led mobile application developments for Fab and Pepo. He is currently working to bring blockchain to mainstream apps. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from the University of Pune. In his free time, he likes to work on IoT home projects.

Tell us about yourself!

I am currently based in Pune, Maharashtra. My hometown is Nasik. It’s in the western part of India, and it’s very close to Mumbai. It’s a very beautiful city with a very rich mythological history. It is famous for great grape vines and onions.

I went to school in Nasik, then completed my bachelor’s in electronic engineering from the University of Pune. I started my career as a back-end developer in a multinational company about 11 years back. iPhones were a very hot topic during that time, so I spent my time learning IOS. I slowly became very good at it, and that helped me to deliver the very first IOS app for the organization that I worked for at the time. I can say I’m one of the few developers that have seen and developed on all generations of iPhones.

Seven years ago I joined, Jason Goldberg, Nishith Shaw, and Sunil Khedar at True Sparrow Systems. I’ve been part of the journey through Fab, Hem, Pepo, and now OST. Through these seven years I managed IOS app development for Fab and Pepo. I led the mobile team for five years, and I currently contribute to protocols and mobile SDKs for OST.

What excites you about blockchain?

Blockchain has a lot of potential. I can say it’s the future and it will be adopted by the masses, but it is going to take time to harness its potential. We all know that blockchain can be beneficial in the financial domain, but it can be used in many other domains as well. Since blockchain is secure and transparent, all the participants have access to the same data, and it’s very difficult to alter or revert any transactions.

Blockchain has many applications. For example, some applications record real estate or car ownership. Others handle logistics where product history is maintained, or manage e-commerce systems that can trace a product’s history. Two years ago, when I used to tell people I’m working on blockchain, about 95 percent of them didn’t know what it was. The ones that did would tell me “Ah, you are Bitcoin trading.” Things have changed. There is more awareness of what potential blockchain has, and I’m very excited about it. OST is acting as a catalyst to bring blockchain to mainstream apps.

What does your role as director engineering at OST entail?

As a director of engineering I work as a hardcore developer, so I get to do hands-on development. I currently work with two teams: the protocol team and the mobile SDK team. I’m lucky to be working very closely with CTO Sunil Khedar and chief blockchain strategist Ben Bollen. We discuss requirements, we plan, we develop, we test, we do code reviews and peer reviews, and we all have a vision of what OpenST and Mosaic should be.

Initially, we knew that mobile SDK development would be needed, but not until a later stage. I started contributing to the OpenST protocol and writing unit and integration tests for the 0.9.1 release. While doing this, I started to get a good understanding of blockchain, Ethereum Virtual Machine material, and the OpenST protocol. Then on the 0.9.2 release, I contributed actual contract code. My involvement increased in the 0.9.3 release with the implementation of gateways. I also contributed to OpenST airdrop contracts. In short, I do development, write unit and integration tests, and I contribute toward the javascript interaction level. As of today, I am working on the mobile SDK, architecture and design coding, and code reviews. I also work to debug any issues that team members face while integrating the protocol.

What do you look forward to for OST in the following months?

This will be a very interesting year for OST. We have a very well planned road map and we are 100 percent committed to delivery. I’m really excited to have a major role here. We will see a lot of releases, starting with protocol 0.10.0 beta, the wallet SDK, and partner pilots. We will also have the OpenST Mosaic beta, universal wallets, and much more. These are just the stepping stones towards fully autonomous decentralized economies!

Thank you, Deepesh!

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About OST

OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies for mainstream businesses and emerging DApps. OST leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses. In September 2018 OST introduced the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OST KIT is a full-stack suite of developer tools, APIs, and SDKs for managing blockchain economies. OST partners reach more than 300 million end-users. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures, and 500 Startups.