IOTA review

IOTA, the eighth largest blockchain in the world and one built specifically to power the IOT (internet-of-things) economy, launched a Data Marketplace today, in partnership with over 20 large organizations around the world, including Microsoft, Bosch, Samsung, Volkswagen and Fujitsu. The Data Marketplace is IOTA’s most comprehensive pilot study thus far. The goal is to enable a true decentralized data marketplace that opens up the data silos that keep data limited to a few entities as is the case today. Data is one of the most imperative ingredients in the machine economy and the connected world and over the next next decade there will be more than 75 billion connected devices that interact in different manners. This will give rise to a ‘Machine Economy’ where devices will trade everything from storage, computation/analytics to eletricity and sensor data. The data trade and this pilot project will highlight the latter and explore the potential it has. With the prospect of 10s of billions of devices generating data we will see a proliferation of data that is unmatched in history.

What IOTA team is emphasizing is that its new Data Marketplace is a big chance to showcase how a real-time micropayment business model can enable innovative apps for supply chains, smart cities, AI, and more. “We are not only giving connected devices the ability to securely transfer, buy, and sell fine-granular and diverse datasets, we are completely breaking down today’s data silos and enable a permissionless, interoperable ecosystem that will be the backbone of our connected future,” the group said in its announcement.

HOW IOTA IS DIFFERENT? IOTA doesn’t use blocks and so, unlike the Bitcoin and Ethereum chains, it doesn’t require miners or suffer from block-size restrictions.

IDEA BEHIND THE COIN: IOTA’s vision of connecting every IoT sensor and device for real-time transactions also depends on every piece of connected hardware being upgraded with a specialized component — a “curl hasher” — that would allow it to support IOTA. The curl hasher would enable even small devices to do their own hashing “for hundreds/thousands of transactions per second locally,” which would enable IOTA to scale enormously

LOCATION: IOTA is run by the Germany-based non-profit IOTA Foundation, which raised a multimillion-dollar investment from U.K.-based Outlier Ventures earlier this year and exceeded a $1.5 billion market capitalization on its first day of trading in June.

WHEN? The IOTA ecosystem is itself still in beta testing, and the new marketplace is a pilot at this stage. The team hopes it will be a model for an IoT-based market in which machines will actively trade data and compute power to enable all kinds of new capabilities.

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