Which Distributed Ledger Technology can give viable solutions to real world problems?
Blockchain created a ripple in the Internet driven tech world. People often say that it is the future of everything. Only the future will say how much it will be able to deliver. We must remember that blockchain is just one specific type of distributed ledger. There can be many other distributed ledgers.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is promising. There is definitely a huge future prospect. Blockchain is one of the earliest DLT that maintains distributed ledgers into immutable chains of blocks. Initially it was implemented for bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency, that rose very high in 2017. The hype of bitcoin is slowly coming down as the price of bitcoin is decreasing fast in 2018.

People are blown away by the popularity of bitcoin. The greed driven cryptocurrency captured the attention of the mass. It is a big hype and many of us started to associate distributed ledger with only blockchain, as if it is the only one. In reality, the future rests on the non-blockchain or block less distributed ledger technology.
As the blockchain network grows, it requires more and more computing power to solve the cryptographic Proof-of-Work puzzle. Hence, blockchain requires huge amount of electrical energy to run the show. Cost and time utilized for each bitcoin transaction increase everyday.
IOTA is a next generation distributed ledger. IOTA is open source and supports the Internet of Things (IoT). It relies on a radically different protocol and doesn’t require any block. IOTA works on a protocol called Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).
The distributed ledger of IOTA doesn’t consist in transactions grouped into blocks. The transactions are never stored in sequential chains. Instead, the IOTA transactions are stored as individual ones entangled in Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG). No mining is necessary for IOTA system. So, there is no explicit cost or fee for IOTA transactions. Moreover, as the network grows, the time spent for each transaction also decreases.
IOTA opens a new way for permission less and fee less machine to machine micro transactions
Micro transactions are often not successful for blockchain based bitcoin. The miners are not interested to verify small transactions because the mining reward is very small for transactions of smaller amounts. On the other hand, IOTA opens a mining free digital economy for the world of cryptocurrency. Thus, IOTA will find plenty of opportunities in societal applications.
The future seems promising. When the IOTA network grows, then many things can happen. Do you consider IOTA as a disrupting distributed ledger? I would love to get your views and counter views.
This article is an outcome of a joint research study carried out by Jose Munoz Mata and me. We are testing distributed ledger technology for biometrics and other real world applications.
