IOTA is a crypto technology that facilitates transaction between the Internet Of Things and devices. The acronym IOTA stands for Internet Of Things.
IOTA came about the crypto space to deal with transaction fees and the scalability issues prevalent in the Blockchain community. It does so by getting rid of block and chain.
Not Your Typical Blockchain
IOTA is not your typical network. When working with IOTA, there is no need for submitting transactions to a ledger like its done on other Blockchain networks. Instead, the user is needed to verify two other transactions. The verification method means no central ledger exists and hence no mining or miners needed to power up the network.
Devices on the IOTA network verify each other randomly and build a consensus through web connections and transactions. Cryptographers call this verification a directed acyclic graph which is commonly known to IOTA creators as a tangle.
The computing power of the tangle grows along with the network. The system is made for the processing of payments between machines and facilitation of machine micro-economy. Meanwhile, IOTA promises fast and free transactions.
How It Works
Research by Gartner indicates that there are about 8.4 billion IoT devices in the world today. The outlook for future growth is exponential. Organizations, farms, factories and even homes and stores are investing in infrastructure for monitoring such as sensors, cameras, and stores. IOT’s future can only get better.
IOTA’s objective is becoming a platform for M2M transactions. But for IOT to become useful, devices in the network have to share and allocate resources efficiently. This means devices have to buy more electricity, bandwidth, data, and storage whenever they need them and sell them when they don’t. This also implies myriads of transactions as devices communicate and use resources simultaneously.
A typical Blockchain wouldn’t sustain and would be crippled on such a situation. That’s why they charge fees for miners to add your transaction on the block. Blockchain doesn’t have the capacity transact many transactions at a go. It, therefore, cannot to accommodate the IOT applications.
Thus, the IOTA was created for the purpose of solving scalability issues and fee charges which is prevalent in Blockchain. In the IOT, billions of devices can run on the network efficiently.
The Team Behind IOTA
Behind the scenes is an IOTA team that has been on active development since 2011. In 2016, the team emerged with the IOTA foundation. It has since been growing by adding talents from across the world.
The team is led by David Sonstebo who is best known for conservative marketing approach. He chooses to focus on the sustainable growth of his network rather than PR stunts popular with today’s crypto projects. He even handles PR and blogging activities himself for it to be in line with his strategy.
His team comprised several talented individuals with a diverse range of expertise. The project happens to attract the attention of academics as well. The project has partnered with the imperial college of London, UCL, and UC Berkeley.
It has already partnered with Microsoft and is on the path of creating new opportunities with renowned firms like Volkswagen.