We recently sat down with Zalman Goldstein, COTI’s software engineer, to discuss his role and what’s in store for COTI in the upcoming months.

Zalman Goldstein is a software engineer who is an expert in fintech applications. Prior to COTI, he worked in several companies as a developer in the payments industry. His track record includes developing a cheque validation tool and managing internal finance software solutions.

Zalman Goldstein - COTI’s software engineer

At COTI, Zalman dove right into working on the pilot for COTI’s future database. Following that, he moved on to building the DAG itself, including the connections between transactions, the confirmation process, and thresholds, which are network-wide upper limits that must be reached for a transaction to be confirmed.

COTI R&D team

He also worked on the concept of Trust Scores in the COTI network. This idea was first intended for users but quickly developed into an entire trust network. To this effect, every element in the network has its own Trust Score, including Nodes, servers, consumers, merchants, and arbitrators.

Zalman most enjoyed working on the DAG, the mathematics and network topology (i.e. the layout of connections, such as computer network nodes). Network topologies may be physical or logical, where the physical topology is the physical design of a network that includes devices, locations, and cables.

Topological sorting was also another major task he tackled. Because COTI’s data structure is based on a DAG, as opposed to a blockchain, there was a need to sort the network from the edges to the center instead of linearly.