Web3 Tokens: IOTA Explained — AAX Academy

In the futuristic future after the 3rd or 4th tech-industrial revolution, with autonomous cars and factories, 10 to 12 devices for every child and woman walking on the face of the planet, smart cities, internet of things and quantum computers, blockchains might not be the only part of the new web 3.0 paradigm.

Will We Have Blockchains As Part Of The New Web 3.0 Paradigm?

Not every crypto enthusiast will agree but proof-of-work blockchains have serious issues to address, and it’s important to do so. Two top dogs, Ethereum and Bitcoin, that attract most of the market share, are still proof-of-work blockchains.

Slow speed of transactions, high fees that ran up to $40 per an operation on the Bitcoin network in 2017, draconian amounts of electricity consumed, fierce competition between miners to discover a new block and users to get their transaction written into the new block — those are all problems to be solved, and, hopefully, they will be solved soon.

However, we already have some projects out there that anticipate quite a different futuristic paradigm.

One of these projects is IOTA that’s developing a technology not rendered useless by quantum computers. “I hate to even call it a cryptocurrency because it is about so much more,” says IOTA’s CEO Terry Shane.

So, let’s take a deeper look.

What Is IOTA?

Soon enough Cortana, Alexa, Siri and Alice will be able to talk to each other without us taking part in the “conversation” — doesn’t it give you chills once you start thinking about it? What can they possibly be “talking” about?

Put simply, IOTA is a protocol designed to execute these “conversations” in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem.

It’s not a blockchain, though. The developers rather call it “Tangle”, and it’s a DLT technology that has no blocks, no chains, no miners and no fees. Right, zero fees.

The philosophy behind the product was well articulated by Terry Shane: “With IOTA, every user is simultaneously a miner for somebody else. In order to complete a transaction I have to perform a small amount of proof-of-work for two randomly chosen people.”

So, basically, the philosophy built into the code of the IOTA project comes down to the philosophy where “my needs are best met by meeting the needs of the community of others in the system.”

IOTA case uses

Now, how will the IOTA protocol work in the society after the 3rd or 4th industrial revolution?

According to Terry Shane, our grandchildren are unlikely to own cars. It will simply be natural for them to buy mobility as a service where an autonomous vehicle takes them from A to B without the worries about fuel, insurance, maintenance tolls, parking tolls or any other annoyances we associate with car ownership today.

However, let’s imagine that in the future you own an autonomous vehicle. As an autonomous financial agent, the car will be able to perform services and transactions instead of just sitting in a parking lot all day.

Think of it as not a car, but an autonomous financial agent.

It’s going to pay the road infrastructure directly on a per-mile basis, it will exchange data with other cars and “negotiate” with them in case you’re about to go back home at a rush hour, it will pay fees for you to later travel on a three-lane highway rather than on a side street, maybe it will even trade tokens.

That being said, it’s just one of the use cases for IOTA. Even though this all sounds futuristic to date, the prototypes are being developed already by Volkswagen, and IOTA is the only protocol that would enable such scenarios to work.

Interested? Jump on the bandwagon of the future early on and check out the investment potential of the IOTA token on AAX now!

Originally published at https://academy.aaxpro.com on November 28, 2020.