Interview with Koen from XRPL Labs
Tell us a little about yourself — without using the words “I”, “me”, “myself”, “Koen”, or “KoenPaas” (muhahaha j/k).
I work at XRPL labs with an amazing team and currently create xApps - got into crypto a while back and took it seriously in 2017. It started with Ethereum and Monero mining until I discovered the fees and transaction speeds were agonizing slow and ridiculously expensive. I couldn’t wrap my head around the new technology, this should be better and after looking for other projects I stumbled across XRP, this was almost everything I wanted in a blockchain project at the time. Since 2017 I’ve been holding, accumulating a small amount of XRP & learning to code whilst still being a student. Now I enjoy working with this amazing community!
What is or will be your greatest contribution to the crypto space/community?
Doing now: Creating Apps that just work, creating a better user experience is where currently I put all my efforts in.
Long term: Redefine how we make payments and exchange currencies with one another all over the world.
What’s a quirk that you have?
Hands down checking the XRP price everyday, don’t we XRP geeks do that all the time? Other than that it’s my way of cooking throw all my emotions in the dishes.
If you could change one thing in the crypto space, what would it be?
It would be to let people stop attacking other projects as we are all in the same boat — and open their eyes to maybe even better solutions for the problems we want to solve. I like the hype around it but the bear market has it’s pro’s as well.
Tell us about your Twitter profile pic. Is that a…. blue deer cat?
My profile picture is a Cool Cat it’s a NFT project, I wanted to get a glance into the space of NFT and buy into a great project. My 2 cents on NFT’s is that they will become very big and the tickets you use to get into a sports game for example will also become NFT’s.
What do you like about your job and what are the most challenging aspects of it?
I like the people I work with the most, and the community is the best in the space - very intelligent people, they picked one of the greatest tech regarding blockchain. The technology I work with is very cool as well the newest tech and being close to the devs who are all creating amazing things.
Most challenging is the 24/7 market, it never stops!
What’s something interesting regarding XRPL Labs that people don’t know?
We have the most mechanical counters for things like number of unique customers for the XUMM tangem cards.
How has crypto changed your life for the better and for the worse?
It made it better by meeting all these enthusiast and brilliant minds getting together and creating something awesome. The worst part is keeping emotions in check with these crazy prize jumps.
What are your thoughts on a custom Banana themed XUMM Wallet?
I would be interested to know how that would look.
What question would you like to ask Wietse?
When is he taking over payments with XRP and XUMM, and while we’re at it when moon XRP?
