“Blockless” Digital Ledger Technology (DLT) & IoT: Interview with Kevin Chen, Founder of IOTA Evangelist Network (PART I )
We interviewed Kevin Chen, who left his role from Wall Street upon realizing that blockchain technology could disrupt his career there, and decided to make this switch before that happens. He is now the Founder and Head of the IOTA Evangelist Network (IEN) which spreads awareness of “blockless” (non-blockchain) digital ledger technology (DLT), particularly IOTA’s Tangle protocol (some may also be familiar with IOTA’s native cryptocurrency that reached as high as $15 billion in market cap and top 5 of all cryptocurrencies late last year ).
In this FIRST part of this interview, Kevin discusses Tangle and shares his views on blockless architecture, the Bitcoin scalability problem, first, second and third generation blockchains, the machine-sharing economy, internet of things (IoT) and more (to learn from him in person check out his upcoming workshop).
What is IOTA?
IOTA is a cryptocurrency native to the DLT protocol called the Tangle. It is notable for “blockless” architecture where it uses the directed acyclic graph (DAG) instead of the blockchain. Therefore, it is feeless and more scalable than conventional blockchains. Its applications are primarily in the IoT domain, especially for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) micropayments and data messaging.
Tell us more about current blockchain inefficiencies in which IOTA was launched to address.
I believe that when Bitcoin was created, Satoshi intended it to be more of a PoC (Proof Of Concept) to show the feasibility of P2P (peer-to-peer) payments without corruptible intermediaries (i.e. Lehman Brothers) rather than an actual product geared for mass adoption.
