Lennart Lopin, M.A. Software Engineer, Entrepreneur, Futurist, MarsOne Finalist

Bio

Lennart Lopin was born in North-Eastern Germany in 1978, close to the Baltic Sea and the original V1 rocket test site in Peenemuende. He grew up in Vienna, Austria after his parents fled East Germany in 1984. He currently lives in Sarasota, Florida. His parents' background in engineering and communication systems (his dad is an electrical engineering / automation wizard and his mother used to work as a radio operator) instilled a deep love for science and technology. But it was Astrophysics in particular that excited Lennart from an early age – as a bibliophile, when he ran out of books on science at his local Viennese public library, Lennart would attend public university lectures at the age of ten studying orbital mechanics to satisfy his incessant curiosity with all things Astronomy.

Graduating high school in Austria with a perfect score (4.0 GPA) Lennart's love affair with Buddhist philosophy found him studying ancient Indian languages and ordain as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka in the late 90s. Lennart graduated from the universities of Goettingen and Rostock in Germany in 2003 with a master’s degree in Computer Science and a specialization in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. His thesis focused on automated text-analysis and summarization exploring machine learning methods to uncover semantic structures in text corpora. In 2005 his creative chatbot "Prelude" won him an international championship medal in the category of "best self-learning system".

Mr. Lopin has spent vast amounts of time on various private and public software projects. As an Austrian economics student he discovered Bitcoin early in 2011 and has been involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem ever since, including the launch of his own cryptocurrency project “Marscoin” to explore alternative funding methods for planetary scale projects. Fluent in eight languages (including Latin, Sanskrit and Pali) Lennart, father of two sons and two daughters, authored over 30 books on early Buddhist meditation practice and ancient Indian languages. He is an ardent chess player, P90X enthusiast, SCUBA diver and book collector.

As a senior software engineer with an extensive experience in international software projects and an early adopter of crypto- and blockchain technology, Lennart leverages his wide experience currently in overseeing the development of Byte Federal's cutting-edge technology stack.