Given the Bitcoin price craze in the face of the morose economy during the Covid-19 pandemic, one may assume that the distributed ledger technology (DLT)/blockchain bubble is ready to burst once again. However, new developments justify paying close attention to this sector.

The idea behind IOTA, launched in 2015, is to create an open-source public DLT fit for the IoT economy. Tomorrow’s digital economy will run on automated, distributed cyber/physical systems. New approaches to data management and sharing between citizens, organisations and IoT assets or machines must be designed around novel digital trust frameworks and a new type of e-infrastructure. IOTA wants to be for IoT what TCP/IP has become for the web. The vision is a machine economy where IoT assets, e.g. autonomous vehicles, participate in creating and exchanging value through machine-to-machine transactions.

Minimal usage fees and a low-energy consumption for running the overall decentralised network are needed to allow frictionless data sharing and the emergence of new data-driven business models such as “everything-as-a-service”. While conventional public blockchain protocols introduce fees associated with miners’ node operations and lead to controversial energy consumption, IOTA removes the need for miners and their operational friction altogether. Read More>>