IOTA: Becoming Undervalued Again?

IOTA is a project I am hopeful for. IOTA recently pumped from a low of 0.35 to 5.35 in one month, before correcting to around $4.00 now is IOTA ready to surge again? This is what I will discuss today in this post.

I believe it is for the following reasons:

1. IOTA's technology is objectively superior to 1st gen "blockchain" ledger tech.
2. IOTA's price has remained stagnant for a month while the market has boomed around it, soon some fickle profit takers will move on from XRP, ADA, XLM, and Tron to name a few.
3. IOTA partnerships, and their team are growing.

First point, IOTA's tech is objectively superior to 1st gen "blockchain" ledger tech:

What is IOTA and How is it "superior"?

The IOTA team describes IOTA as:
"IOTA is a revolutionary new, next generation public distributed ledger that utilizes a novel invention, called a “Tangle”, at its core. The Tangle is a new data structure based on a Directed Acyclic Graph. As such it has no Blocks, no Chain and also no Miners. Because of this radical new architecture, things in IOTA work quite differently compared to other Blockchains. For a Blog post outlining IOTA in more detail, you can head over to our Blog."

Source: official IOTA documentation: https://iota.readme.io/v1.2.0/docs

In my own words:
IOTA is a 3rd generation cryptocurrency, created by a non-profit based in Germany, funded by donations, which has innovative answers scale called the "tangle". And the tangle is an entirely new way of recording data on a public ledger, which enables fast, free, secure, microtransactions through a peer-to-peer validation whereby each user transacting with IOTA must first validate two other unrelated transactions. In this way the system grows stronger as there are more transactions, and so scale issues are circumvented.

A "Tangle" is different than "Blockchain":

Here is a visual representation of the Tangle, viewing this will help show how transactions can occur faster, because you will see they occur concurrently, not just sequentially.

Conversely, a blockchain records data into "blocks" which are limited in capacity, which are processed sequentially, meaning that if your transaction is submitted after mine, (assuming the fee you paid doesn't let you skip the queue) you wait till my payment goes through, and then yours will. In this way, as the system grows, and use grows, transactions necessarily begin to queue, and delay, because their is a doorway, with limited throughput, which is the "block" capacity.

Since Steemit is growing and not everyone fully understands blockchain basics, here is a visual representation of the "Blockchain":

In this simplified pictorial example, you can see that only three transactions can fit in each block, meaning that if you are not one of the first three to submit your transaction, then you will have to wait for block two. In reality the numbers are larger, and block size is better measured in transactions per second than per block. Bitcoin for instance handles about 5 transactions per second, 300 per minute, and 3000 per 10 minute block.

This might seem large but with millions of transactions per day the system simply cannot handle what it needs to and the payments wait... and wait. A side problem arises out of this delay, some servers will give preference to users who voluntarily pay higher fees to making those transactions get VIP access to the next available block. Incentivizing miners not to care about slow transactions because they get higher payments in times of greatest backlog.

Second point, IOTA's price has remained stagnant for a month, while the market has boomed around it:

When price action slow fickle investors move on: XRP, XLM, ADA, and others will cool off eventually

I am very bullish on XRP, XLM, ADA, and many other major gainers of the past month, BUT we need to understand that corrections are healthy, and investors will profit take sooner than later on these projects. When they do, many will move that value into another cryptocurrency project that has a recognized use case, and intrinsic value, but which has had less positive price movement recently: IOTA is a likely candidate for many such investors.

A coinmarketcap review of IOTA will show you that for a full month IOTA has been consolidating, establishing support at multiple layers through at and below the $4.00 price point. This is very healthy, and investors will see this as a safer investment than some other projects which have very recently boomed into new all time highs themselves.

Also, please note IOTA has in the past 30 days triple topped at around $5.30 USD, meaning that it reached that value three seperate times. This indicates a strong resistance barrier, but which once pierced will then likely become a strong support line on the way up into blue sky breakout new highs.

Lastly, I will point out that in terms of price action, when IOTA reached 10 Billion+ market cap it was a huge achievement, at the time only Bitcoin, Ethereum and maybe Ripple had reached that milestone. Recently that benchmark is becoming less prestigious, now there are ten different projects with a market cap of 10+ billiion. I believe this fact would make it more believeable to investors that IOTA could suddenly tripple in value, making it somewhere between 30 Billion and even 45 Billion in value. Before this would never have happened because the bulls would caution themselves as IOTA pressed this high, but after XRP has shown that Ethereum is not impassible, others will try, and others will succeed.

Third, IOTA partnerships are growing:

There has been recent media allegations that IOTA misrepresented a "partnership" with Microsoft, while IOTA denies, and they explain that they never said Microsoft was a "partner" only a "participant" in the burgeoning IOTA data marketplace. Here is a quote from IOTA responding to that criticism involving Microsoft:

“We have never stated that there was any formal partnership with Microsoft, and instead always referred to them as a participant to the marketplace. The media has overblown the story into a “IOTA launches Data Marketplace with Microsoft”, which couldn’t be further from the truth, as we are working together with more than 30 of the largest companies in the world on the marketplace as a co-innovation exercise. When it comes to our communication and the involvement of Microsoft, we have asked for written and explicit approval of the press release, quote and logo beforehand and have stayed within the boundaries with what we were allowed to do.”

• https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/12/iota-partnership-microsoft-marketplace/

And yes Microsoft has begun working with this IOTA protocol, as have Volkswagen, and Bosch, among others. If you want to see more info about these relationships, check out this Reddit link.

The link provided lists all the companies coming along side with IOTA, and the list is growing. Also the list provides links that further detail each relationship.

I think it is fair to say these "partnerships" are in early stages but it is clear that big companies have an interest in what IOTA offers, or at least, what it may one day offer.

Conclusion:

I believe IOTA is a great cryptocurrency, with a lot of potential. Much of that potential has yet to be realised however the same is true for most of the projects in this space at the time of this post, Ripple XRP is just starting and yet has grown tremendously, ADA is still in dev but is blossoming. If you go through the top 9 cryptos right now, more than half, in my opinion, have unfinished projects and major hurdles ahead, including scale. While IOTA has many of the same development concerns ahead yet, at least IOTA has scale figured out.

People have lost their minds recently for Raiblocks on the grounds that it solves scale, and therefore must be the next Bitcoin, but its not as far along as IOTA and IOTA makes the same promise.

I believe IOTA may be the next big coin ready for a 50% or 100% pop. Why? Because the IOTA has better technology, and an objectively better answer to scale than any 1st gen crypto. Because IOTA's price has remained stagnant for a month and fickle profit takers from other projects will move on soon, possibly into IOTA since it hasn't surged as recently.
And also because IOTA has growing name-brand recognition and developing partnerships.

This post took several hours to compile, so if you enjoy the content, please up-vote, comment, re-steem and follow.

If you want to support me one amazing way, which will cost you nothing, is by signing up to trade at Binance using my referral ID:16877222. If you do I will get a portion of the trade fees the exchange would otherwise collect, so through no extra cost to you I will receive your support. I use Binance and love it, if you want more info on that, check out my recent blog recommendation Binance: The Best New Crypto Exchange?.

Disclaimer:

I hold IOTA so I have a vested interest in its success, take my recommendation with a grain of salt. Also understand that I am not an expert, I am just a guy talking about my interests on the internet. Please do not invest more than you can afford to lose.