COTI’s 30+ people team is built from highly experienced individuals from IBM (Former head of research), Ripple (former CRO), Blackrock (Former CIO), Investec bank (Former CEO), and Israeli elite army intelligence units. In this article series, we will be taking an up-close look at COTI’s R&D team. This time we sat with COTI’s product manager, Costa Chervotkin.

“My hope is that paying with COTI will be as simple as paying for groceries using a credit card at your local supermarket”

Costa Chervotkin has previous experience as a product manager at a handful of FinTech companies. At COTI, Costa is responsible for defining the what, when and why of the products that the engineering team is tasked with building. Costa is currently working on mapping out COTI’s systems and functions. He describes what he does as being akin to an architect designing a home from the ground up - anything from the simple accessories like light fixtures to the most fundamental aspects of a house.

“I need to think about every step, button and link tied to COTI and how to best order all the components to efficiently build out the system,” explains Chervotkin.

It all starts with planning the flow of every step and options, then working with a designer to bring the vision to life. Once everything is finalized, it is passed along to the programmers. The main challenge is prioritizing time over the perfect execution of the project. As a product manager, it’s crucial to divide a project into phases in order to properly meet deadlines. The end result can’t be perfected from the start, so working step by step with the resources at hand is the most logical approach, leaving refinements to the very end.

For Costa, COTI’s pre-sale was only the first step. At the moment, he’s working on COTI PAY and COTI-X.

COTI PAY, the first app built on the Trustchain, is the real use of the COTI token, which users can utilize to purchase goods online at a number of COTI-powered merchants. Of course, it’s important to understand that it will be a beta version or the MVP. As such, many of the features will still be under development.

“It was fascinating for me to learn how a dispute resolution system could work in day to day life for users, as well as how to implement it on a technical level through COTI PAY. My main task was to ensure that it would be just as user-friendly as it is for traditional payments,” said Chervotkin. Because the process of making a purchase through a crypto wallet is typically difficult, at COTI it’s all about making the experience as simple and intuitive as possible for users and merchants. “My hope is that enterprises and merchants will be able to regain control by offering their own user-friendly payment systems using our technological infrastructure,” commented Chervotkin.

Besides COTI PAY, Costa is also working on the COTI-X currency exchange, which will serve as the gateway to purchase and exchange COTI tokens.

“I really believe in the process of moving forward when we have a good product and supporting it with a beta version in order to gain real-world insights from real users. Afterall, we are building a system with the end-user in mind, so feedback is everything,” says Chervotkin. “I currently view the COTI payment network as a clear and user-friendly system.”