A great innovation demands an equally strong leader, and or group of individuals that are on the same page and constantly looking for ways to improve the process. Today, i want to introduce to you the amazing team and community behind IOTA.

![ioi344444.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmabCM5A8sv7kYJqefL2Nraou6teNaoFMu3Cpg7b6TotF4/ioi344444.png)


**Founders & Core Development**

**David Sonstebo, Sergey Ivancheglo, Dominik Schiener and Serguei Popov** are the heart and soul of IOTA. All four founders have been in the blockchain space since early 2010/11. They first pioneered the "proof of stake" consensus behind "NXT" , before creating IOTA out of a real world necessity. Iota came out of a stealth hardware startup, which is working on a trinary microprocessor named "Jinn". In an attempt to serve the demand of the IoT, the "Tangle" was born.
Additional members of the core devepoment team include: Alon Elmaliah, Pheonix Zerin, Paul Handy and Alfred Keller.

**IOTA Foundation** 

![io7676222.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmRooyVP8sZiRcCKPZzFJwESdTE8fj1PGpH4nXDhG7ngxZ/io7676222.png)

The project is governed by the non-profit IOTA Foundation situated in Berlin, Germany. It's sole mission is to build a functioning ecosystem and standardizing DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology). In the recent months David Sonstebo, has brought a lot of new expertise to the foundation. Members are highly reputable professionals in their respective fields and bring a variaty of skills to IOTA. Some of the names include: **David A. Cohen, Per Lind, Alexander and Jochen Renz, John Halamka, Navin Ramachandran, Carsten Stöcker, John Edge, Wilfried Pimenta de Miranda, Cyril Grunspan, Julie Maupin, Regine Haschka Helmer**.

**IOTA community**

Growing strong everyday is the amazing IOTA community on Slack. Now counting a total of 13600+ active members.
Everyone is welcome to join. Simply follow my link https://slack.iota.org/ . 
Are you completely new to IOTA and dont know how to manouver on Slack? Simply send me a DM on Instagram, and I will guide you through it.


If you like my report, be kind enough to upvote/resteem and follow me for more IOTA content daily:)



![io354525.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmdoen143ACDjxY6jEEcx78TQ1dxSab64HHD2s7a8eWHrd/io354525.jpg)

![io677777.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmc5mPQ9ytofGcep76iDFZ6cAMBDC4851ciDwPNXM2ZnKu/io677777.jpg)

Channel donations:

HLOJZEDYAQLAKKNFDLGFOOVURRIG9UACXMTGUWJRLMVFUQG9YYOLNYRVYOAPIHBPRIYGEISE9QEQUZYVMWOYBHKXYB

Text sources: Original Content by Iotaforall (@steemhoops99)

Image sources:

https://goo.gl/kF4fhJ

https://goo.gl/V582NF

https://goo.gl/sfr5kf