Interview with Mathieu Viossat, Thetangle.org creator

By Daniel De Michele Last updated May 23, 2019

Mathieu Viossat is the creator of thetangle.org, one of the first and more popular Tangle explorers in the web.

Let’s get to know what is on this guy’s mind and how exactly does an explorer works.

Geronimo Patat
Writer & Editor, IOTA Hispano

If you like what we are doing help us to continue working! Donate: http://www.iotahispano.com/donate/

Tell us a bit about your background.

I grew up in the French countryside. I was about 11-year-old when I started to write my first HTML pages and compile some basic C programs. I always wanted to create things online and was involved in many projects, from illegal subtitle team to SaaS applications, usually as leader or solo. I quickly became very interesting in software development and decided to do an IT engineer school after my graduation, despite I learn as autodidact.
Immediately after my master degree I moved to Dublin to work as a software engineer.

After 3 years there I switched to new projects, all around DLT.

What’s the story behind your approach to DLT? When did you discover them?

The first time I have heard about Bitcoin was in 2011 on a small IT website, the title of the post was something like “Bitcoin, a digital currency reached parity with US Dollars”. I read the common technical things about Bitcoin, installed the original client on my laptop and tried to mine few hours… without many luck.
In 2013, I became a GPU miner. I learned many things, involved some friends, a real passion. It was a really great time… until Mt.Gox collapsed and the beginning of the ASIC centralization. I had some ideas and created several projects around DLT, but never found something really interesting until TheTangle.org.

When did you find out about IOTA and what were your first thoughts?

I discovered IOTA shortly after its listing on Bitfinex. I fell on the official website (the old one, the fancy, heavy and dark one) and ask myself “a scalable and feeless DLT without miner?”. I was intrigued in the technology, wanted to understand how it work, so I join the Slack community, experimented the wallet (the old one again, not Trinity) and started running my own fullnode. Still interesting in the non-blockchain approach, I wanted to build something with IOTA. IOTA is also IoT-focused and I deeply think the next big think is about AI and IoT.