One of Komodo’s organizational goals is to add more advisors to the growing team. In light of this important objective, Komodo is pleased to welcome our two new Strategic Advisors: Dr. Sajib Datta and Mr. Michael J. Toutonghi are both joining Komodo, bringing with them a wealth of knowledge and experience.

Dr. Datta is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Mr. Toutonghi is a former Technical Fellow at Microsoft and the Lead Developer of Verus Coin.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Dr. Datta and Mr. Toutonghi and recognize some of the achievements of Komodo’s two new Strategic Advisors.

Dr. Sajib Datta

As an undergraduate student, Dr. Datta majored in computer science at the North South University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Later, he earned his Doctorate of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA).

Dr. Datta’s dissertation, “Performance Analysis of Multiple Classes of Traffic In Wi-Fi Networks: Theoretical And Experimental Study”, focused on Wifi networks and optimizing the quality of wireless local area networks (WLANs) infrastructure.

After earning his Ph.D from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UTA, Dr. Datta became a Lecturer in the very same department in 2014. For the last 4 years, Dr. Datta has taught a variety of undergraduate courses, including Intermediate Programming and Computer Network Organization.

Now, Dr. Datta is launching a brand-new course on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. The first semester of this new class will be offered in Spring 2019 to students at UTA. The course will give students the opportunity to build decentralized applications on Komodo Platform.

Dr. Datta is leading the collaboration between Komodo and UTA. The collaboration includes the course on blockchain tech, two senior design projects, two undergraduate as well as two graduate scholarships for one full academic year, and an educational blockchain competition that students from all across North Texas will be eligible to participate in.

Komodo is excited to have Dr. Datta on the team and looks forward to all of the fantastic collaborations that lay ahead.

Mr. Michael J. Toutonghi

Mr. Toutonghi has over 30 years of experience in the tech industry. He spent a large portion of his career at Microsoft, where he held a tenure for almost 20 years, from leading kernel development on Windows 95 to co-founding and leading architecture and development on Microsoft’s .Net platform.

Mr. Toutonghi rose to the role of Vice President and later Technical Fellow of Microsoft’s Advertising platform, where he developed geoscale solutions for merging auction and contractual marketplaces.

Since his roles at Microsoft, Mr. Toutonghi has consulted with both public and private companies, helping design, plan, and build high-scale, distributed applications and machine learning systems.

Now, Mr. Toutonghi is focusing his talent and skills on the cryptocurrency space. As the Lead Developer for Verus Coin, Mr. Toutonghi and the rest of the Verus community are making enormous contributions to the blockchain industry.

These contributions include developing VerusHash, a new cryptographic hash function that CPUs and GPUs solve, using comparable resources and with competitive hashrates, and a new combination consensus mechanism that is 50% Proof of Work (PoW) and 50% Proof of Stake (PoS).

In addition, Mr. Toutonghi and the Verus developers designed and implemented solutions for two of the biggest challenges for Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains: the theoretical “Nothing at Stake” attack and the problem of “Weak Subjectivity.” The solutions are simple, elegant, and robust. They also bring great progress to the blockchain space.

More recently, at block height 227520, the Verus team implemented the Sapling upgrade to the Verus codebase. Developed by the ZCash team, the Sapling upgrade makes private z-transactions faster, requiring less data to be processed and sent between nodes. Verus Coin is the first project, apart from ZCash itself, to implement the Sapling upgrade to their blockchain.

Komodo is very grateful to have Verus Coin as an ecosystem partner. Komodo and Verus Coin have an ideal open-source relationship that greatly benefits both projects.

Verus originated as a friendly fork of Komodo, using the KMD codebase and adding a few excellent innovations on top. Mr. Toutonghi leveraged Komodo’s tools, such as Komodo's Custom Consensus framework and UTXO-based smart contracts, to develop groundbreaking solutions.

Verus is working alongside Komodo to share these open-source technologies first with participants in the Komodo ecosystem. The benefits of these advances can then be leveraged by any projects that choose to launch a blockchain on the Komodo Platform.

As other projects launch on Komodo, they can also choose to collaborate and contribute their own enhancements back to the community, in whole or in part. It’s a perfect example of the positive feedback loop a thriving open-source community can create.

Komodo is very pleased to have Mr. Toutonghi on the team as a Strategic Advisor. Mr. Toutonghi and James “jl777” Lee, Komodo’s Lead Developer, are continuously collaborating on developing cutting-edge technologies. Everyone is excited for all the new innovations to come.

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