IOTA announces partnership with SinoPac to propel financial innovation

The IOTA Foundation has announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with SinoPac, a Taiwan-based banking holding company, to explore the “new digital innovation landscape made possible by the IOTA Tangle technology.”

SinoPac operates throughout the Asia Pacific region and has been actively exploring blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT). With this collaboration with IOTA it will further investigate the opportunities presented by IOTA’s Tangle technology. Tangle has been developed specifically to handle the demands of the Internet of Things but IOTA are keen to demonstrate that it has other use cases.

SinoPac has built on Tangle for its iCertificate, a “notary certification service, which applies to all kind of digital documents in the public or private sector.” According to Tina Chiang, SinoPac’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, the iCertificate was needed “not only in education or public utilities territories, but in trading and supply chain industries.”

Chiang said that thanks to IOTA’s support the iCertificate was created as “a flexible and extensible service,” one which “consolidates the bothersome landscape of many individual and different digital certification authorities into one platform.”

Increasing practical use of blockchain in finance
Speaking on behalf of IOTA, Wilfried Pimenta de Miranda, the Foundation’s Head of Business Development, said they were thrilled that SinoPac was taking “their notary certification platform to the next level.” Not only did it demonstrate Tangle’s applicability to “a wide variety of corporate products and services,” it also showed “the increasing practical and real world usage of distributed ledger technology in the financial sector.”

The announcement was authored by Holger Köther, IOTA’s new Head of Partnerships, in his first public communication since joining the Foundation. Köther spent the last 17 years at corporate giants Siemens and Atos before making the switch into the crypto world. IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø said that they were “very happy to have Holger and his extraordinary breadth of experience on board.” Köther will take responsibility for overseeing IOTA partnerships and ensuring that “projects grow from PoCs [proofs of concept] to fully fledged applications.”