Ten years ago it was unthinkable, not even in the most expensive Hollywood science fiction productions could fit the idea that our everyday objects could not only generate money but also the option to pay directly for us our purchases, services or debts.
It sounds incredible but that possibility is getting closer and closer to being achieved thanks to what they call artificial intelligence (A.I.), which has facilitated the interaction of the things that surround us with our lives in a very close and even more and more dependent way.
Of course, for things to interact with us and with each other they require a medium and that is where the internet is present. It is for this purpose that the IOTA project arises, a DLT protocol that together with a cryptocurrency, seeks to develop highly scalable solutions that allow interconnecting IoT devices in a secure and decentralized network. Of course, this vision does not renounce other utilities inherent to cryptocurrencies, such as financial transactions, but its focus is more on other things.
Imagine for a moment the refrigerator in your house doing the food shopping based on the fact of your family's consumption data, not only that, through its own wallet your appliance contacts the supermarket and makes purchases on its own account with cryptocurrencies, that is, with IOTA through an internet connection. This is what IOTA is all about, the Internet of Things (IoT).
The initial development was funded by an ICO in 2016, and participants bought the IOTA token with other cryptocurrencies. This raised approximately 1300 BTC, which corresponds to approximately $500,000 USD at the time, and the total supply of tokens was distributed proportionally among the initial investors. Earlier in the same year the project's whitepaper was presented highlighting Tangle, the network that would form IOTA along with a number of powerful new features.
Unlike bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, IOTA does not use a blockchain but Tangle, a technology that instead of using blockchain, like other cryptocurrencies, is based on the DAG (Direct Acyclic Graph) algorithm. This system is also decentralized but it is faster, scalable and allows many transactions to be carried out simultaneously.
Thanks to the Tangle today we have the possibility to manage anything that is connected to the Internet, from a smart car to a Wifi network. Anything with a chip can now be used or rented by a person anywhere in the world and in real time.
Basically, this new technology wants people to be able to earn money in a safe way by allowing other people, from anywhere in the world, to access the capacity of their devices that are connected to the Internet and that is not fully used when they perform activities such as surfing the web or checking emails. In other words, we could benefit from renting or leasing the power of our machines while using them for simpler tasks.
IOTA was established with just over 2.7 billion tokens. All IOTA tokens that will ever exist were created on the genesis blockchain. The total money supply of 2,779,530,283,277,761. This amount will never increase or decrease, plus it is optimized for ternary computing.
The technology behind IOTA also proposes interesting solutions such as micro-transactions, to generate new business opportunities between smart devices; data transfers, which are immune to any kind of attacks; service provision of anything with an embedded chip to be used by another person in real time; and masked messaging, which allows for the exchange of highly sensitive data without the possibility of being tracked.
IOTA's projections are endless. Its ambitious project to connect all devices to this great new mother network and offer its value to anyone and in real time has allowed it to count more and more on the strong support of many optimists in the crypto world. This is why it is no coincidence that today (the day when we write this article) IOTA ranks among the top 30 cryptocurrency options, according to CoinmarketCap's ranking, since its creation.
IOTA is seen as an ambitious project, however, because of all the spaces it intends to cover, its optimization for everyday use looks quite difficult to process in the short term, however, with the emergence of 5G connectivity, the emergence of electric cars and greater presence of technologies that use artificial intelligence, IOTA is seen as the right one for this new era that is coming.
