| [iot-wg] Introduction: IOTA Distributed Ledger for IoT |
Dear Eclipse IoT Group,
it is a pleasure to join this group and more formally introduce a project that me, David and our team of 16 people now have been working on for the past 18 months. The project is called IOTA (https://iotatoken.com) and it’s a non-profit, open-source initiative that is developing new Blockchain solutions specifically for the Internet of Things. When I met Benjamin Cabé during IoT World in Dublin it became apparent that there is a lot of overlap with what Eclipse is doing (and we are in fact, in touch with many of the same companies). As such, I am here today to give you a better introduction into what we’re doing and give some prospects about a potential collaboration.
As I suppose, many of you have heard of Blockchain by now and probably know of its benefits, as well as its limitations. The benefits are immutability, security, autonomous execution as well as the mitigation of trust. The major limitation is of course scalability, transaction fees, data storage requirements and data privacy. Because our team has been in this Blockchain space for 4 - 5 years, we realized early on that we have to develop a new solution: which is how the IOTA Tangle - which is our unique distributed ledger architecture - came to be.
The major benefits offered by the IOTA Tangle are: scalability, data privacy, quantum-immunity, micropayments without any transaction fees and partition tolerance. We developed IOTA specifically for the Internet of Things, which is this asynchronous environment where we are transitioning away from cloud, towards fog/mist computing now. Not only that, but through IOTA we want to enable this Machine Economy: where devices are able to trade any resource (whether it be data, computational power, electricity, bandwidth etc.) on demand with each other.
We are already working together with some of the largest companies in the world on Proof of Concepts around IOTA. With Canonical we are for example developing “Bandwidth on Demand” for LimeSDR’s LoRA capability; with others we are working on transactive microgrids; and we are working on supply chain visibility / automation.
One of the main reasons why we joined the Eclipse group is because we see a lot of mutual collaboration between our non-profit organization and the Eclipse Foundation, and in fact, we want to actually go into a more formal partnership between both entities to leverage the capabilities of both.
To end this email, it’s time for some links! Attached to this email you will find our whitepaper (for those who are into math, you will love it); our presentation which goes into detail what IOTA is, our vision and the current stage. You can find our development progress on Github: https://github.com/iotaledger. Our sandbox environment should be ready this week, so then you can easily start playing around with IOTA (right now there is a bit of an entry barrier I would say).
Looking forward to keeping this discussion going and engaging in other, fruitful discussions within this group! If any of you are around in Berlin or Oslo, would love to meet up.
Best regards
Dominik and David
IOTA Foundation
Attachment:
IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Attachment:
IOTA BConference Presentation.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document