IOTA reaches 10-month highs following $100m foundation launch

The native token of the IOTA distributed ledger ecosystem, also called IOTA, witnessed a sudden rally following the announcement of the new IOTA Foundation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

IOTA is up by 35% in the past 24 hours and is trading at $0.236 at the time of writing. The asset reached a 10-month high of $0.285 shortly after the big announcement. IOTA’s market cap is currently standing at around $720 million with a daily trading volume of $773 million.

Despite the recent rally, IOTA is still down by 95% from its all-time high of $5.69 on Dec. 20, 2017. 

On Nov 29, IOTA announced the launch of the $100 million distributed ledger technology (DLT) foundation regulated with the Abu Dhabi Global Market, called the IOTA foundation. 

Per the announcement, the new foundation will be based in Abu Dhabi and the company will invest $100 million worth of IOTA tokens in its seed round. The assets will be vested for four years with the main aim of building the IOTA ecosystem.

According to data provided by the market intelligence platform Santiment, the recent announcement has triggered a massive boost to IOTA’s social activity. The asset’s social volume witnessed a 1,745% rally in the past 24 hours, per Santiment data.

Moreover, IOTA’s total open interest (OI) has been constantly rising since Nov. 21. According to Santiment, IOTA’s total OI rose from $8.7 million on Nov. 27 to $8.8 million a day later. However, there’s no real-time data to show the exact OI of the token.

In late January this year, the European Union selected IOTA for the European Blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement to test the blockchain technology.