IOTA — The elephant in the room

The story of IOTA is fraught with both drama and exceptionality. IOTA dared to envision the true potential of Distributed Ledger Technology and pursue the vision through all adversity. Even after a 95% market cap decrease and the removal of two founders from the board of directors, IOTA is stronger than ever. In fact, many in the community believe it would be make for a great movie one day.

I believe that IOTA is the elephant in the room, the one that that the majority kind of ignore until they shit their pants when it makes its real position known. The delivery of Chrysalis and Nectar over the next month will be a wake up call that will profoundly resonate through the lagging DLT space.

Infrastructure

IOTA is an infrastructure enabler, one of the main challenges today is that there are disconnected systems, data and processes, this disconnection leads to information and knowledge being siloed. These data silos not only represent a failure in the infrastructure that is currently being utilized but also highlight the lost opportunities.

If connectivity between systems were increased, it is expected that this would increase knowledge and understanding as well as making information more accessible.

This is where the fourth industrial revolution comes in, it is the epitome of future connectivity. Industry 4.0 can only be achieved through the fusion of different technologies and use cases.

For example, an autonomous vehicle would first connect by 5G (or otherwise) to an IOTA full node and have its digital twin’s identity verified by IOTA identity, it would then submit the IOT data as a first party IOTA oracle (using the Alvarium trust fabric) via the standardized IOTA streams protocol according to the eClassOWL ontology, creating a semantic web of metadata which will further enable the machine economy.

After which, IOTA smart contracts can then execute code using the Ethereum virtual machine (or otherwise) and trigger other smart contracts, or even tokenize and pay for data and services. The data held on the tangle can then be ingested by the cloud providers that are connected to the IOTA network and transmitted to data lakes, and processed into data warehouses, graph databases and ERP systems accordingly.

Why IOTA?

Utilizing IOTA as an infrastructure will offer a solid foundation for digital transformation and innovation.