Julie A. Maupin began her career in the non-profit sector in the mid-1990s.  Working in relief and development in Bihać, Bosnia taught her that human rights and individual economic empowerment are inextricably linked.  This discovery later led her to study both law and economics and think deeply about the interconnections between the two.  Raised in rural Colorado by a paramedic and a plastic-injection-molding-machinist-turned-programmer, Julie always had a natural affinity for technology.  She joined Monster.com as a human capital consultant in the early 2000s and helped pioneer the use of internet-based talent acquisition methods by Fortune 500 companies in Seattle.  After riding out the dot.com boom (and then bust) and growing her revenue portfolio to over $5 million in just a year and a half, Julie headed to Yale, where she obtained graduate degrees in law and economics. 

Over the following decade, Julie sojourned in South Africa, Switzerland, the US again, and then Germany, quickly establishing herself as one of the world’s leading experts in international economic law, global governance regimes, and alternative dispute settlement.  She picked up a PhD in international development studies along the way, and in 2014 she was appointed Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg.  Julie had begun passively following Bitcoin in 2012 while teaching at Duke Law School and was immediately taken with its potential to provide access to finance to the world’s unbanked populations.  The move to Max Planck gave her the opportunity to shift her research profile to cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, digital identity management, collective intelligence, and the many other fascinating social innovations DLTs make possible.  Her knack for connecting the dots between the legal, economic, social, and technical dimensions of these innovations in plain language have made her a sought-after public speaker and advisor to governments, corporations, start-ups and inter-governmental bodies. 

Julie currently sits on the Fintech advisory board of the German Ministry of Finance and the G20 Digital Economy Experts Task Force and is a resource person for the UN Internet Governance Forum.  In addition to her appointment at Max Planck, she holds external research appointments with the Centre for International Governance Innovation and the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies.  She has recently been advising IOTA on the incorporation and governance set-up of the foundation and is actively helping to develop projects to be carried out by the social venture fund. 

On being a part of IOTA

Decentralized technologies today are presenting humanity with unprecedented opportunities to re-think the way we organize both our individual and collective lives.  Everything is up for re-invention.  From finance to social networking to democracy itself… there has never been a better time to be on the cutting edge.  Thanks to its adherence to the golden rules of parsimony, modularity, and interoperability, IOTA has the potential to truly become the backbone of the Internet-of-Everything.  Especially when considered in combination with parallel developments in artificial intelligence, the possibilities are staggering.  I’m thrilled to be part of this budding community of pragmatic idealists.  I look forward to contributing to the mission to ensure that IOTA develops in impactful ways that deliver broadly distributed benefits not just to the fortunate few, but especially to the many historically underserved segments of our planet’s amazing and diverse populations. 

We are thrilled to have someone as professional and passionate as Julie join the project.  She has been assisting us behind the scenes for some time now, particularly the IOTA Foundation registration process, but also various other valuable tasks, and has been absolutely tremendous.  Her expertise and vast experience overlaps perfectly with a lot of the upcoming plans for IOTA, so we expect great synergy.  Everyone give her a warm welcome!