IOTA Foundation

IOTA Unique technology. She distributes the registry. It is also based on a data structure called a path. Tangle retains the similarity to the blockchain, but removes the block structure in favor of a directed acyclic graph structure. There are no specialized miners on the network. Each user who generates a transfer on the network is required to prove work in several ways. This allows for a zero-transaction-fee model where the only cost users pay is the proof-of-work required to validate two transactions for every transaction initiated.

In this system, the smallest monetary unit that is not divisible is called IOTA. There is a fixed supply of 2,779,530,283,277,761 IOTA. When the project was launched, funds were collected from November 25, 2015 to December 21, 2015.

IOTA is unique in that it is managed by a centralized coordinator. All of this is closed source. This is exactly what IOTA was talking about in their transparency manifesto. The task of the coordinator is to provide a checkpoint to protect against attacks on the network while it is still young. The coordinator was a source of decentralization discussion for young distributed registries.

The organizer of all this is Neha Narula. He is the director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. She co-authored a paper on the study of cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA. Contact with Neha Narula prior to this blog post inspired IOTA to temporarily switch from a proprietary cryptographic function known as Curl to the more standard Keccak (SHA-3). Sergei Ivancheglo of IOTA posted a response to the investigation suggesting that the vulnerability was previously known and deliberately included as a copy protection mechanism. Debates erupted from members of the cryptographic society. Constructive criticism from Vitalik Buterin and other Ethereum participants was also expressed.

Bitfinex was the first to start trading IOTA on June 13, 2017. At the time of the listing, IOTA's market capitalization was valued at over one billion dollars, the highest public listing price at the time.

According to the IOTA team, the Tangle architecture allows for infinite scaling. At the same time, the speed is limited only by the number of transfers in the network. IOTA uses ternary not binary.

IOTA was founded by four people. These include Sergey Ivancheglo, Sergey Popov, Dominik Shiner, as well as David SonstebSonsteboe. According to the IOTA Foundation, the initiative has grown rapidly since then, with team members now working in more than 25 countries. At the same time, only Sonstebo and Shiner sit on the board of directors. Popov, in turn, is a member of the board, as well as the research director of the foundation. Ivancheglo Zhe left the project back in 2019. At the same time, he is an informal adviser in the company. He said in a statement at the time, “I no longer believe that the IOTA Foundation is the best platform for me to implement what we set out to create back in 2014 and 2015. I have always done my best work in less harsh conditions. I look forward to continuing to work independently on IOTA hardware and software.”

Well, as we mentioned a little earlier, the fact that this is actually a blockchain without a blockchain is pretty unusual, to say the least. The key innovation of IOTA is the Tangle, a system of nodes used to confirm transactions. IOTA claims that Tangle is faster and more efficient than typical blockchains used in cryptocurrencies.

The more technical name for Tangle is directed acyclic graph, and as Sönstebø explained in a blog post back in 2015, this technology aims to preserve the blockchain’s ability to perform secure transactions. The only difference is that it gets rid of the concept of blocks.