IOTA is Slowly Patching Up Its Cracks From Prior Attacks
Hacking a wallet is one of the worst things that could happen to a cryptocurrency. This nightmare and a few more malfunctions have befallen IOTA since 2017. Consequently, IOTA has gone down from 4th overall, with a market cap of $13.2 billion in 2017, to 25th, with today’s market cap of $4 billion.
What IOTA Has Been Up to
The beta version of its new wallet was launched recently. But that’s the tip of the iceberg in this massive roll-out that will make things right, said IOTA Foundation co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dominik Schiener.
However, the critical question is how much technology and people have matured in and behind it. Many things have changed for the IOTA Foundation, including the core team. IOTA has worked for the last 1.5 years on an upgrade to the network, which Schiener says would solve problems. Chrysalis, this update, is a new dawn for IOTA, said Schiener.
Oracles are another recent addition to IOTA (i.e., bringing data from the outside world to IOTA). Schiener referred to Alvarium as an IoT oracle and said that third parties like Chainlink wish to build oracles on IOTA. But IOTA is currently constructing its bootstrap oracle.
Schiener also listed some projects involving transparent supply chains with partners like Zebra Technologies or Trademark East Africa. Alvarium, a collaboration with Dell, is a project that highlights IOTA’s angle.
The focus of Project Alvarium is on how to secure and retrieve data from IoT devices. Those scores reflect the trust that data are not manipulated and are sufficiently secure for utilization, sharing, and monetization.
Last but not least, IOTA is currently working on its version of smart contracts. It is different from Ethereum’s “world computer” approach since IOTA applies sharding to subnetwork partitioning.
IOTA is Ushering in a New Era
Everything above, in fact, indicates a new IOTA phase. Each of the new developments would be interesting even in isolation. Although they have retained the core ideas behind IOTA, they appear to make a “completely new project,” Schiener put it.
There is no lack of desire for IOTA and Schiener. It depends mainly on the maturation of the technology and the organization behind the technology to deliver on the enormous promise of the new IOTA.
The timeline shared by Schiener is quite aggressive, intending to deliver everything mentioned above in 2021. It is essential to keep an eye on IOTA to see if these brave thoughts will succeed.
