IOTA

The exchange rate of one IOTA at 13:28 UTC is 0.2084$

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“IOTA” was founded in 2015 by German entrepreneur Dominik Schiener, Russian mathematician Sergei Popov, Norwegian entrepreneur David Sonstebo and software engineer Sergei Ivancheglo from Belarus. In 2018, the IOTA Foundation was formed by Schiener and Ivancheglo to guide the further development of IOTA. In June 2019, Ivancheglo resigned from the Board of Directors of the IOTA Foundation. Schiener, Popov and Dr. Navin Ramachandran remain in the IOTA Foundation at the moment.

Over the years, IOTA has built partnerships with major companies such as Volkswagen, Jaguar Land Rover, Bosch, Cisco and Dell Technologies. But none of IOTA's major partnerships have been fully implemented. The company is often criticized that loud announcements about the start of partnerships with major players are made only to stir up interest in the token. For example, after the announcement of the start of work with Jaguar Land Rover, the cost of IOTA increased by 20%.

IOTA creates a layer for data storage and communication of devices connected to the Internet. However, unlike traditional technologies, Iota uses a type of centralized distributed network system known as “Tangle” that can operate without blocks, chains or miners.

“MIOTA” is IOTA's native cryptocurrency, which is a blockchain project created to conduct transactions between machines and devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT).

One MIOTA equals 1 million IOTA, the national currency of the IOTA distributed ledger ecosystem. It is usually called MIOTA, as opposed to IOTA, because IOTA is too small a unit of measurement. IOTA does not support on-chain governance or mining on the blockchain, which means that MIOTA does not give owners the ability to vote on the direction of the protocol's further development and is not used as a mechanism to encourage fair participation on the network. Instead, MIOTA is simply used to process payments.

To store data on the network, IOTA uses a distributed ledger technology known as “Tangle”. While both Tangle and blockchain technology are distributed ledger technologies, there are two key differences in how they are implemented.

First, Tangle does not use blockchain. Traditional blockchain technology stores collections of transaction data (“blocks”) in a linear chronological order (“chains”). This process requires that each block is attached to the previous block. As a result, later transactions must wait until the previous block joins the chain before they can be added to the sequence.

Unlike traditional blockchain technology, Tangle transactions can be tied to any part of the Tangle system rather than a single point on the blockchain. By removing chain sequence from blockchain technology, Tangle can validate and store transactions in parallel and rapidly scale transaction processing. This process is based on a type of cryptographic verification known as “Directed Acyclic Graph” (DAG). To complete a transaction using a DAG, a user must confirm two previous transactions online. This means that the speed of the system is proportional to the number of transactions performed.

Tangle does not need blockchain miners or a consensus algorithm to validate transactions. For traditional blockchains such as Bitcoin, transactions are verified by blockchain mining using a “proof-of-work” (PoW) consensus algorithm. For Tangles, messages are checked by the "Coordinator" network node, which checks if the message contains a link to a milestone.

The “Coordinator” is an application independently run by the IOTA Foundation that is responsible for sending signed messages or milestones to validate them. All nodes in the IOTA ecosystem know the location of the Coordinator to acknowledge messages. The Coordinator stores all the information about every transaction in the network and transmits this information to the nodes in the form of milestones. The Coordinator sends indexed milestones at regular intervals.

Because Tangle does not require miners, data inside Tangle can be verified at high speed. For now, the Coordinator system is a centralized process, but IOTA is expected to become fully decentralized when Coordinator is replaced by “Coordicide” as part of the IOTA 2.0 update. Although no official date for this update has been given, it is believed that IOTA 2.0 may appear by the end of 2022.