IOTA-Origin / An alternative reusable method to claim ownership of an IOTA address.

By Olaf van Wijk Last updated May 23, 2019

Origin: “the point or place where something begins, arises, or is derived.”

What is the problem exactly?

IOTA and its tangle take a novel approach to distributed ledgers with the result of fee-less and quantum secure transactions and without theoretical scaling limitations. Because of this feelessness it makes IOTA very interesting for data-centric applications that have no immediate use for a token (that is like 99.9% of the applications) but do need a DLT for the basis of decentralization and transparency.

Everything in IOTA is a transaction that sends something to an address. This can be either tokens or data. To proof the IOTA tokens are yours you will have to spend them. But the ability to proof that some data is yours is currently not possible with the exception of Masked Authenticated Messaging(MAM). Which is very well explained here: https://medium.com/@abmushi/iota-mam-eloquently-explained-d7505863b413

For the creation of IOTA-Pay (a working solution for the donation problem: https://ecosystem.iota.org/projects/iota-pay), I studied MAM extensively and my first prototype was also based on MAM. However MAM is a streaming method and does that very well but was not completely what I needed.

What I needed was something just like the MAM root, an alternative way of proving the address is ‘yours’. So like MAM but more flexible and potentially transferable to other addresses and that also works outside of the tangle, something like:

this is my address and if I send a zero value transaction there you can be damn sure it was me who did that.

And if I direct to another IOTA address that is signed by me then you can be as sure that the 0 value transaction to that address came from the same… origin.

I won’t go into specifics here about IOTA Pay, but during its creation I believe I created something that will be extremely beneficial to the entire ecosystem. Something extremely flexible that allows us to create new starting points or origins in the tangle on which data-centric applications can build on. But lets first dive in on how it works and at the end we explore some of its potential!