Greetings to IOTA fans and all crypto friends! With the help of IOTA vibrant community and industry partners working towards real-world adoption, the IOTA project has come a long way in the past three years. These weeks the team worked fingers to the bone as usual! They recently published their Coordicide blueprint, which outlines the progress they have made so far, as well as the challenges left to tackle. After that, the team published a blog post in which they laid out their roadmap for getting the Coordicide approach to maturity. The team announced the open-sourcing of the GoShimmer Prototype and invited the community to install and contribute to the project.
Moreover, in order to share the IOTA story with you all, they’ve developed IOTA Insights, a series for organizations and individuals to learn about IOTA’s key focus areas on a quarterly basis. Each quarter, the IOTA Foundation will set aside time for a call to highlight a set of insights exploring our strategy, execution, and positioning. The IOTA Insight calls are available to everyone and can be accessed live or post-recording.
IOTA Links with STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, to create a new level of powerful, seamless and cost-effective access to IoT functionality. Watch Alessandro Maloberti, Director of Partner Ecosystems at STMicroelectronics, speaks about the collaboration between IOTA and its importance for the IoT Ecosystem on their official YouTube channel. XAIN receives a strategic investment from Dominik Schiener: Schiener’s contribution is one of the first major crypto investments of its kind and propels XAIN’s Federated Machine Learning technology forward.
As for the social side, for the second time in history, the entire IOTA Foundation gathered for the annual IOTA Summer Summit! eToro CEO Yoni Assia took IOTA’s Dominik Schiener on a boat trip through the canals of Amsterdam to discuss IOTA’s popularity, challenges and future. IOTA co-founder Serguei Popov, Olivia Saa and Paulo Finardi’s research paper on “Equilibrium in the Tangle” has been published in the Elsevier’s Computers & Industrial Engineering Journal.
IOTA community and ecosystem are increasing in size and this is amazing! These weeks the team announced their 2nd IOTA Development Contest on Hackster.io: Empowering Machines with Wallets. $3000 plus in prizes! Start BUIDLing today!
Development
GitHub metrics:
Development is ongoing. Commits on public GitHub appears regularly, several times a day.
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Coordicide: The Road Ahead
With the help of IOTA vibrant community and industry partners working towards real-world adoption, the IOTA project has come a long way in the past three years. While the Coordinator has been an essential component thus far for securing the network, it is often described as “training wheels for the network while it is still in its infancy.” The team has been hard at work understanding how to safely remove those training wheels.
They recently published their Coordicide blueprint, which outlines the progress they have made so far, as well as the challenges left to tackle. But solving those problems is just the first step; the solutions still need to be implemented, tested, and ultimately ready to support the IOTA network in the real world.
Removing the Coordinator is the number one priority for the IOTA Foundation’s Research & Development teams. The Coordicide project is a joint effort between both the Research and Engineering teams, and they also welcome those in the IOTA community who would like to get involved.
At a high level, the strategy looks like this:
This strategy can be understood in two distinct phases: the Research and Implementation phase, and the Testnet phase. The final goal, then, is to perform a Mainnet Transition, where the current state of the ledger is brought into the new network.
Phase 1. Research and Implementation
During this phase, the team has three specific goals:
- Solve the open research questions around each Coordicide module
- Write a comprehensive technical specification, which can be used by both the IOTA Foundation and any others who may wish to implement an IOTA-compatible node
- Implement the specification as the IOTA Foundation’s future reference node software; for now, the working title of this node software is “Bee”
As each module is fully developed, work on the specification and implementation will be started in parallel. By following this strategy, ideally, the reference node software will be available without much delay after the last research questions have been solved.
Coordicide Prototype: Go-Shimmer
As a further speed-boost towards the production node software, the team is also working on a rapid prototype called “Go-Shimmer”, which aims to test the consensus algorithm and some of the other Coordicide modules. This will allow them to have a simplified “Alpha Net” for development, feedback, and to simply provide a sanity-check against their Coordicide implementation without first formalizing the specification or writing production-ready code.
In the meantime, preliminary work on Bee has already begun. The modular, plug-in based architecture is being defined, and many modules are already well-known or do not have any significant open research questions. These modules include:
- Ternary
- Hash function
- Networking
- Gossip
- Transaction layout
- Tangle graph structure
- Ledger state & balance calculator
- Generic HTTP API
- Client API built on HTTP API
- Local snapshots
Further research into the remaining modules is well underway. These include mainly those listed on the Coordicide website, namely:
- Shimmer (consensus algorithm)
- Mana (Sybil protection)
- Auto-peering
- Tip selection
- Node identifiers
- Rate control
- Timestamps
- Node bootstrapping & syncing
In addition to these Coordicide node-specific modules, many existing projects such as the client libraries and the IOTA Hub will be updated as the new specification is defined.
Phase 2. Coordicide Network Launch: Testnet
Unlike the rapid prototype, the Coordicide Testnet is what they consider the first Release Candidate for the Coordinator-free network. The most difficult obstacle to overcome during this phase is to answer the question: “when are the IOTA Foundation and the IOTA community confident enough to entrust the entire valuation of the IOTA network to the IOTA new node software?”
New projects starting from scratch do not have to worry as much about this question since the amount of money at stake may be small by comparison. For IOTA, however, it is imperative that the Testnet mimics as closely as possible the real-world network, including both:
- Enough honest actors to meet the required security assumptions, and;
- Enough highly-skilled malicious actors and security experts doing their best to find any and all breaking points
In any cryptocurrency network, the real test of security and resilience is done over time as the network grows and attracts users and provides a strong economic incentive for both types of users to participate.
In a Testnet, as tokens do not typically have any real dollar value associated with them, the team, therefore, needs alternative solutions to incentivize this kind of use. They are currently planning two bug-bounty programs, which will run in parallel:
- A standard bug-bounty program, for finding errors or bugs in the code or on the running network
- An “integrated” bug-bounty program, where they insert Testnet tokens that are redeemable 1-to-1 with mainnet IOTA tokens, in the event a malicious actor is able to move them onto an address he/she controls
Both bug-bounty programs will be graduated, starting with a relatively small amount of value and increasing the bounty over time. Initially, IOTA Foundation will provide these bounties, but they may set up a bounty pool for community members to “stake” their own IOTA tokens against Testnet tokens. This provides an excellent mechanism for people who trust the new system to prove it, by putting their own tokens on the Testnet before the full ledger is copied over.
Phase 3. Mainnet Transition
The final step is to transition the ledger balances from the existing network to the new network, which at that point becomes the new, Coordinator-free Mainnet.
Once the community reaches consensus that the Testnet is stable and will support the IOTA Mainnet in full, the team will be able to specify the exact time of the transition, which will be performed by snapshot. This time will be the final period during which exchanges and all other network participants should prepare their applications for the upgrade.
Planning for Change
The team plans to maintain backward compatibility for users of IOTA Foundation supported libraries and software as far as possible. This includes the Trinity wallet, client libraries, IOTA Hub, and more.
Since they anticipate that the hash function and signature scheme, and thus wallet addresses, will change during this upgrade, the Trinity wallet will include a fully automated transition process. Users who open their wallet for the first time after the network transition will see their funds moved to a new address. Funds received at old addresses would also be automatically sent to a new address.
Additionally, historic data already written into the Tangle will remain available through permanodes. These will enable querying for historical transactions, independent of snapshots or other protocol changes.
And of course, it is important to mention: work to improve the current node software — IRI — is an ongoing effort and will not be affected by the Coordicide project. Current IOTA users can expect to see ongoing progress and network improvements, even before Coordicide is complete.
Open Sourcing of the GoShimmer Prototype
The IOTA team strongly supports the decentralized and transparent nature of DLTs. Not only within the technology they develop, but also within their own Foundation. Most of their work remotely from all over the world, and they recently opened up the Engineering communication channels on Discord. Now, the team is ready to push this approach even further by opening up their Research department’s code on the prototype.
In the previous blog, they laid out the roadmap for getting the Coordicide approach to maturity.
This involves the continued effort of a research phase in which they tackle the main challenges they face. At its heart, Coordicide can be accomplished through a fine clockwork of multiple mechanisms: two consensus mechanisms — the Fast Probabilistic Consensus and Cellular Automata, an autopeering system, node identities, a spam protection, new tip selection, and many more components.
Naturally, new concepts and research should be tested in an experimental manner in order to proceed to the next level of implementation in a protocol. An important step, therefore, was to introduce a code base on which they can experiment and test some of their many hypotheses. This is achieved by implementing the concepts of the Coordicide blueprint into a prototype code, which the team calls GoShimmer.
Engage with GoShimmer
With this blog post, the team invites the community to engage with this Research prototype implementation at the GitHub repository
As a research department, and in order to achieve the goal of Coordicide, they engage with all the involved components in parallel. Hence progress or even solutions come from different fronts and independent of each other. In order to facilitate a seamless conversion of this knowledge to an experimental level, they decided to set the parallelized approach that they work with on a daily basis at the very core of this prototype itself. This is achieved by designing the code in a modular fashion, where each module represents one of the essential components. This also can easily be seen by opening the main.go file of the GoShimmer repository, which comprises of the list of modules that are currently implemented. Through this approach the team is enabled to convert their concepts piece-by-piece and more importantly, simultaneous but independent of each other, into their prototype.
By the time of opening up the repository, the team has covered most of the fundamental tasks that are necessary to create a modular and performant framework. In the coming days and weeks, they will continue to add the missing building blocks, to make this node a fully functional prototype that uses the new concepts described in their Coordicide blueprint. Even though the development of this code is ongoing and hence not finished, they want to give the community the opportunity to follow the development process closely and take part in the testing of the individual modules.
To give the community an opportunity to test out this initial GoShimmer prototype, they have written a high-level overview of the modules that are included as well as three step-by-step guides, describing how to:
- Run a node
- Send spam transaction
- Subscribe to the transaction event
Over the coming months, the Coordicide team will work on moving this initial prototype forward towards a public alphanet. In particular, they will be adding Ledger state, the consensus modules and the reputation system — all the progress which you can see in the repository in real-time. This will give IOTA research team and the community the perfect opportunity to test out the future of IOTA in an open environment.
Empowering Machines with Wallets: 2nd IOTA Development Contest on Hackster.io
The team announced their second IOTA development contest focused around machines with wallets. The contest has thousands of dollars worth of prizes up for grabs, including a drone, VR headset and 3D printer. They want developers to flex their creative muscle and build something completely new.
Up until now devices were only able to send data to each other. This means that if a device wanted to sell something, to another device or a human, it would have to involve a payment system to collect the money. This adds fees, contracts and complexity to something that should be easy to do.
In this contest, they invite you to integrate hardware and the IOTA protocol to create a device that can send or receive payments in exchange for goods or services. They want you to create something that wouldn’t be possible using standard technology.
This could be something as simple as a light bulb that turns on when you send tokens to it or as complex as a set of devices that are generating electricity and selling it to other devices which are consuming.
To get more info on the contest and what is up for grabs, follow the link.
Introducing IOTA Insights
As IOTA grows into an international organization and technical standard, it’s important that the world inside and outside of the blockchain industry understand the IOTA story, what they are focused on, and how they plan to evolve in the coming months and years. Without a platform to explore the many components that make up their story, the world may find it difficult to grasp the full scope of IOTA in a sea of technologies and digital assets.
In order to share the IOTA story with you all, they’ve developed IOTA Insights, a series for organizations and individuals to learn about IOTA’s key focus areas on a quarterly basis.
They’ve even put together a handy website specifically for updates and content related to the Insights Series. You can sign up here to receive information, learn more about the program, the schedule for future insights calls, and how to participate.
The first ‘episode’ is scheduled for July 30th at 2 PM EST/8 PM CEST, and will cover the following:
Insight 1: Digital Infrastructure, Hosted by Dan Simerman
Insight 2: Smart Cities, Hosted by Mathew Yarger
Insight 3: Standardization, Hosted by Richard Soley
Insight 4: The Future, Hosted by Dominik Schiener
Q/A
For more information visit: insights.iota.org
Social encounters
IOTA Summer Summit 2019:
For the second time in history, the entire IOTA Foundation gathered for the annual IOTA Summer Summit.
Under the searing German sun, the IOTA team gathered on the coast of the Baltic Sea to evaluate the last year’s efforts, plan and organize for the year to come, and enjoy the rare occasion to socialize face-to-face.
Since the last IOTA Summer Summit the team has grown tremendously and now numbers 100 people, located in 23 countries and with even more nationalities represented.
Such a diverse and scattered team can deliver a service around the clock and achieve remarkable results across continents, but remote communication also brings its challenges. Even on the brink of the Machine Economy, eye-to-eye interaction is of the utmost importance.
The Research Department had assembled prior to the main event, for a deep dive into Coordicide, and after a productive weekend the remaining departments joined the event.
Apart from the collective festivities and team-building activities, SumSum was a chance to build stronger bridges between departments and improve the collaboration and communication between professionals with vastly different backgrounds and roles.
The main theme of the workshops was to agree strategy for the following year, within and across teams. Particularly in relation to Coordicide and technology adoption.
An on-site AMA session offered employees the possibility to discuss questions directly with IOTA co-founders Dominik Schiener and Serguei Popov.
On the last day of the summit the workshops were opened to a multitude of visiting collaborators, from a wide range of industries.
United by the goal of securing a sustainable future using distributed ledger technologies, the gathered group discussed the many challenges and benefits of implementing fast, feeless and secure machine-to-machine communication and transactions on a global scale.
Dominik Schiener (IOTA) on why IOTA can solve the incentives problem for machines
eToro CEO Yoni Assia takes IOTA’s Dominik Schiener on a boat trip through the canals of Amsterdam to discuss IOTA’s popularity, challenges and future.
These weeks events:
July 17th, 2019: IOTA Meetup/Workshop in Berlin — Learn how to send data from the Bosch XDK to the IOTA Tangle via MAM even as a programming beginner — presented by XDK2MAM.io and IOTAshops.com
July 20th, 2019: OceanEx Germany Meetup, IOTA Head of Partnerships attending exchange meetup.
Upcoming events:
August 28th, 2019: IOTA Meetup Saarbrücken (Southwest Germany).
IOTA co-founder Serguei Popov, Olivia Saa and Paulo Finardi’s research paper on “Equilibrium in the Tangle” has been published in the Elsevier’s Computers & Industrial Engineering Journal. Download for free here.
Finance
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Information from Thetangle.org (25th July, 2019):
Wallets:
- Stateless Wallet for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux. Semi-deprecated, yet secure. If you can, please use Trinity instead. Please also note that as of May 31, 2018, the old Android Wallet is deprecated and should no longer be used.
- Trinity Wallet for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux.
Trinity Wallet Onboarding
This video will guide you through setting up the Trinity Desktop wallet for the first time, and introduces different concepts in IOTA.
Trinity is the new user-friendly IOTA wallet, from the IOTA Foundation. This series of videos will guide users through setting up and using the wallet.
MIOTA/BTC will be a trading pair available at the launch of the Bitpanda Global Exchange on August 7th! Click here to register.
Roadmap
Research & Development Roadmap: Status of projects in progress at the IOTA Foundation.
Research: Projects still in the research phase
- Coordicide
List and solve all the problems on the way to a Coo-less IOTA. This project is mostly theoretical, and includes threat analysis, mathematical modeling, simulation, and formalization of our consensus protocol.
- Spam prevention and detection
IOTA is looking for creative ways of dealing with FPGAs and asymmetric PoW. They are examining various options, mostly around the idea of throttling noisy neighbors. Their aim is to isolate spammers and protect the rest of the network.
- Automatic peer discovery
Given the community input and various ecosystem projects, IOTA is taking a closer look at the security implications of auto-peering. Although this is a complex research topic, it is important for the team to formulate a well-founded position on this matter, and carefully assess the risks involved.
- Economic Incentives
Continuing the recent efforts of Popov et al with their Nash Equilibria work, the team is analyzing the IOTA incentive model using increasingly more realistic game theoretical models. This incentive analysis plays a fundamental role in understanding the Tangle behavior and its stability when deployed at scale.
- Consensus Algorithm spec
IOTA is working on detailed spec of the Tangle consensus algorithm, building upon the foundation set by the white paper. The main purpose of this doc is allowing public peer review of the algorithm.
- Cryptography spec
This spec details all the cryptographic elements of IOTA: the hash functions, signing schemes, and threat model assumptions. The purpose of this document is to provide a basis for a public peer review and audit.
- Attack analysis
This project is related to the Coordicide efforts, and involves analytical and numerical analysis of various sorts of attacks, from the simplest side-chain double spend to the more complex thug, parasite chain, and splitting attacks. IOTA is working to get numerical estimations for the cost of attacking the network, and making sure the price tag stays prohibitively in the post-Coordinator world.
Engineering: Projects under active development
- Hub
While a number of exchanges have had great success integrating IOTA, it is certainly not the easiest task in the world. Hub simplifies exchange integration of IOTA so that IOTA can be listed in weeks, not months.
- IRI
The IOTA Reference Implementation is the de facto model for running an IOTA node. It is the place where both community and Foundation engineers meet and collaborate to improve the Tangle, and the focus of IOTA network target.
- Coo-free IRI
As it stands, IRI does not support the Tangle as described in the white paper. In order to support alternate consensus mechanisms, the current approach to consensus must be abstracted out so that it can later be replaced by a fully distributed mechanism. This project is separate from, but closely related to Coordicide, and this separation allows us to work on different parts of the problem in parallel.
- Qubic
Enable smart contracts, oracles, and outsourced computation on the Tangle.
- Trinity
While the original desktop IOTA wallet got the job done, it is not exactly the best in terms of user experience. With Trinity, IOTA brings a top quality user experience together with in-depth security audits, enabling more people to use IOTA easily and safely.
- Local Snapshots & Permanodes
Some IOTA nodes care about the entire history of the Tangle, and some don’t. As the Tangle scales, it would become impossible for smaller nodes to keep up. Allowing for local snapshots and permanodes are the ‘two sides of the same coin’ needed to allow for either permanent and selective storage as required for a particular use case.
- C Client
Most existing client libraries are written in higher-level languages unsuitable for embedded devices. Since IOTA is designed for the IoT, it will ultimately be necessary to support small, low-powered, embedded devices, and C is the ‘lowest common denominator’ programming language for many of these potential applications.
- MAM+
While MAM already exists, it is missing a few key features and documentation. A formal specification and improved version of MAM leveraging public-key encryption is currently being written by the experts from the Research Institute for Applied Problems of Mathematics and Informatics at Belarusian State University.
- Tanglescope
Performance and monitoring tools such as TangleScope allow researchers, engineers and interested 3rd parties to gain deeper insights into the Tangle’s network capabilities.
- PoWBox
One of the difficulties in developing for IOTA is waiting for Proof of Work results for every transaction. Additionally, small or low-powered devices may simply be unable to do PoW in a realistic timeframe. The PoWBox provides an example of how PoW may simply be outsourced to a more powerful machine, and demonstrates the flexibility of the IOTA protocol.
- iota.lib.js
The JavaScript client library is widely used for IOTA development, and serves as a reference point for client libraries in other languages.
- Curl+
Since replacing Curl-P with the industry standard Keccak hash function, IOTA has enlisted the help of the renowned cryptography experts from CyberCrypt. CyberCrypt’s experts will take what they’ve learned from Curl-P, work to understand IOTA’s specific requirements, and design a better, more secure lightweight hash function specifically for the IoT.
You can also follow the development on IOTA Official Discord.
Partnerships and team members
IOTA Links with STMicroelectronics to Accelerate IoT Technology Integration
Berlin, Germany (July 23rd, 2019) — The IOTA Foundation is working with STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, to create a new level of powerful, seamless and cost-effective access to Internet of Things (IoT) functionality.
The cornerstone of this cooperation is the integration of the IOTA Tangle, a fee-free, peer-to-peer technology solution, into ST’s STM32Cube expansion software for the industry-leading STM32 32-bit MCU ecosystem, the X-CUBE-IOTA1.
The relationship will deliver Internet of Things integration capabilities to the ST user community, allowing customers to easily and quickly create and prototype new IoT solutions for single or multiple devices. As important, developers can work while enjoying the ability to develop systems, environments, products and services with IOTA functionality and the power of the Tangle’s distributed, highly scalable peer-to-peer network and feeless structure.
“By enabling IOTA functionalities via the X-CUBE-IOTA1 expansion software for STM32Cube software technology, developers can now easily include IOTA features and capabilities in their IoT devices and create valuable applications using the STM32 Open Development Environment, which combines the STM32 32-bit microcontroller family with other state-of-the-art ST components,” said Alessandro Cremonesi, STMicroelectronics VP System Research and Application.
The IoT-enhanced solution will give key industries such as energy, logistics and others advanced performance capabilities in critical areas, including sensing, power management, connectivity, and audio. Developers using STM32 will have the ability to transmit, buy and sell relevant data through embedded technologies like Bluetooth® LE at low cost, with an easy, robust solution.
“With specialized hardware playing such an integral role in the Internet of Things market adoption, it is exciting to work with such partners as ST to enhance IoT’s role as an innovation facilitator,” said Holger Köther, Director of Partner Management, IOTA Foundation. “The IOTA Foundation welcomes the opportunity to work with enterprise leaders like ST to expand our mission of moving beyond blockchain with the world’s first scalable, feeless and fully-decentralized DLT platform, partnered with the world’s leading technology firms.”
Watch a video about the collaboration:
XAIN receives strategic investment from IOTA’s Dominik Schiener:
Berlin, July 23rd, 2019 — XAIN, the AI startup that specializes in privacy-oriented Federated Machine Learning (FedML), announced it has secured funding in cryptocurrency from IOTA Co-Founder Dominik Schiener, continuing the trend of venture capital funding through cryptocurrency. Known for partnering with Porsche to become the first to put blockchain technology into a car, XAIN’s distributed approach to machine learning offers greater privacy, security, and efficiency in the way data is trained.
Building and training artificial intelligence requires, for privacy and security reasons, keeping different parties’ data in separate buckets, or anonymizing data from those buckets before it can be trained and stored together in one AI model. The former limits the effectiveness of AI applications, while the latter adds considerable cost. XAIN’s FedML addresses both issues by training data into separate AI models that are then safely and securely aggregated. The learnings from these data buckets are communicated and aggregated, but only the aggregations are stored.
Through XAIN’s FedML, datasets and AI models can be kept on local premises without putting a burden on compliance. Different parties can collaborate to gain insights from the union of their datasets without ever revealing any single participant’s data to anyone else. As such, there is no need to anonymize or store local data in a central source. This reduces cost and simplifies the data training process without compromising the privacy of local datasets, an attractive feat for businesses.
“We are thrilled to have received Dominik’s support,” said Leif-Nissen Lundbaek, CEO and Co-Founder of XAIN. “With IOTA, Dominik has created a remarkable open-source source ecosystem. We see the open-source approach as relevant to our technology and hope to benefit from Dominik’s expertise. Having him on board helps propel us forward in our quest to provide an open and privacy-preserving AI technology. XAIN’s FedML solution will ensure the truly scalable and effective adoption of AI.”
XAIN’s FedML technology can be used both internally by companies, and externally in the creation of products. The first application running its training models on XAIN’s FedML technology is ANDY. This solution for automated invoice processing consolidates machine learning knowledge from each customer for whom the app is running, all while keeping the customer’s data private in its respective corporate environment. ANDY is designed for larger enterprises, where the application really utilizes its potential — especially when the trained models are consolidated among various departments within a company, or even between corporate subsidiaries.
“XAIN’s FedML technology has proven to be a huge breakthrough in the advancement of AI,” said Schiener. “With this investment I see a great opportunity to help push IOTA further towards product-readiness and bring greater privacy, security, and efficiency to both the DLT and AI sectors. The AI ecosystem is rapidly growing, and I see XAIN combined with IOTA uniquely positioned to create an open and permissionless ecosystem which leverages the strength of both platforms.”
“We invested in XAIN at a very early stage and what this company has developed over the last two years is hugely impressive and most advanced AI technology,” said Dr. Christian Nagel, Founding Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital and Member of the XAIN Supervisory Board. “The strategic partnership with Dominik Schiener proves this once again.”
About XAIN:
XAIN, the eXpandable AI Network, is a Berlin-based technology company that allows businesses to unlock the full power of AI, without compromising data privacy, in order to build solutions that bring enterprises to the forefront of AI utilization. XAIN began as a research project at Oxford University and Imperial College by CEO Leif-Nissen Lundbaek and CTO Professor Michael Huth. Today, XAIN uses the research that was part of its original DNA as the driving force for further innovation. XAIN aims to solve some of the biggest challenges in knowledge and technology transfer of privacy-preserving AI, with an emphasis on Federated Machine Learning for industrial usage patterns. XAIN has received seed investment funding of €6 million, led by venture capital fund Earlybird in 2018.
IOTA certification tooling is now available for 3rd party use at no cost
IOTA upgrades its certificate service with an API, open for third parties:
New IOTA Foundation Team Members
Dr. Bing-Yang Lin:
Dr. Bing-Yang Lin joins The IOTA Foundation as a Senior Software Engineer.
Dr. Bing-Yang Lin lives in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and has almost 10 years of programming and research experience. Before joining IOTA, Bing-Yan worked for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and MediaTek (MTK) for eight years, solving real-world problems. He helped TSMC build a semiconductor memory failure pattern identification system based on data mining, and helped MTK build a machine-learning-based analysis flow to reduce the test cost of integrated circuits. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in 2015.
From 2016 to the May of 2019, he worked in MTK as a senior engineer, and focused on firmware architecture development, code optimization, verification flow automation, and customer-return-chip debug. In 2017, he hosted and coordinated a code-optimization workshop in MTK and was one of the main speakers. The goal of the workshop was to share code optimization and performance analysis experiences for programmers. He was also one of the main researchers in an MTK AI project, with the goal of evaluating the possibility of replacing complicated parts of communication system design by using deep neural networks.
In addition to winning multiple academic awards and fellowships when he studied in the NTHU, he was the only winner of a doctoral thesis award from the Taiwan Integrated Circuit Design Society in 2018. He has published 18 papers in many of the world’s premier journals and conferences.
Evaldas Drąsutis:
Evaldas Drąsutis lives in Vilnius, Lithuania. He started programming at age 16, by coding 2nd generation soviet computers at the hardware level with octal code and punch tapes. Since then Evaldas has held a variety of software-related positions, as an academy researcher, full stack programmer (OS/2, C, many other languages and systems), departmental manager, co-founder and CEO of a successful software company. Evaldas holds a PhD in mathematics and CS from Moscow State University and MBA degrees. Despite being in managerial positions most of his career, he is a techie by nature and never forgot his main profession and passion. Since 2017, he has been working as an IOTA community developer on several open source projects in the domain of Tangle metrics and Qubic. Evaldas is joining IOTA Foundation’s engineering team.
Louay Kamel:
Louay Kamel joins IOTA as a Software Engineer on the permanode team. In this role, Louay will focus on implementing a permanode utilising another of his recent projects: OverDB (a scalable distributed graph / multi-model database engine built on top of ScyllaDB).
Louay lives in Guelph, Ontario Canada and has been in the technology sector for over ten years, with a variety of different skills including coding, supporting, consulting, recording and video-editing.
Dieter Kondek:
Dieter Kondek is joining IOTA Foundation as a member of the Advisory Board. He is a General Partner and Managing Director of Global Blockchain Ventures, LLC. He has over 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur, startup investor and senior executive in the technology industry. Dieter co-founded multiple successful startups and has served as a CEO and in senior leadership positions at both venture capital-funded and publicly-listed companies in the software and infrastructure technologies industries.
Dieter is currently CEO & Co-Founder of MergingMinds,LLC, a Florida-based venture development and growth accelerator company for startups and international technology companies. He is currently an advisory board member of FinTech4Good, InXero Inc. and X-Academy.
See also Open positions at IOTA Foundation.
Ecosystem
UCL Industry Exchange Network Project Released as Official Wallet of The IOTA Foundation: A project that began under the UCL Industry Exchange Network (IXN) for a student’s MSC Computer Science course has been released as the official wallet for the IOTA cryptocurrency.
Introducing The IOTA Community Study: Tobias Mayer conducted a little study on the IOTA Community. This medium post only is a brief overview over the study. You can download the findings here.
XDK2MAM Team visits Daniel Trauth at RWTH WZL IILA. Further collaboration on IOTA coming!
XDK2MAM XDK LoRa Extension — IOTA package available at GH.
XDK2MAM Workshop at Berlin — Public photos album.
Welcome Carlos Azjuque to lidbot.
IOTA in the mobility sector: a complete rundown.
The milestones of 18 months public IOTA project by Markus.
The IOTA Trinity Wallet at a glance by Markus.
Test The Tangle Text by Markus.
Rumors
Twitter:
Lewis Freiberg @LewisFreiberg on Jul 16:
Iota Fujitsu:
Active discussions on IOTA subreddit:
Python library for creating your own IOTA applications and interacting with the IOTA network.
Samsung has developed world’s first ternary semiconductor.
OMG press release mentions progress on IOTA standards!
Buy Car Spare Parts with IOTA in Germany!
Other:
First simulations of the fast probabilistic consensus protocol (FPC) by Sebastian Mueller.
IOTA meant to prevail, based on government and industry choices.
Fireside chat with the IF (Hans Moog): Why is there a Tangle?:
In this video Hans Moog discusses the concepts behind the IOTA protocol and some of the ongoing research topics.
IOTA Coffee Machine by Lewis Freiberg:
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
IOTA community continues to grow, there is a constant increase in the number of subscribers of IOTA social media channels. However the number of subscribers of IOTA official Telegram chats slightly decreased these weeks.
Check out Official IOTA Foundation blog.
Twitter — Official announcements channel. Average number of retweets is 50–100 for one post. Publications with 250–350 likes.
There is also a dedicated Engineering Twitter.
Facebook — Not active since 2019. 50–100 likes per publication, 5–10 shares.
Reddit — Threads with 10–30 comments, 50–100 upvotes.
IOTA Support — Subreddit for all IOTA related problems. 546
IOTA Markets — Subreddit for price speculation.
IOTA Stack Exchange — For the really tough questions.
IOTA Bitcointalk.org: since October 21st, 2015. Discussions on latest updates, price, social encounters etc.
IOTA Family website — Basic knowledge for IOTA beginners such as: what is IOTA, how is it organized, how you can contribute, where you can buy $MIOTA on a onepager website, etc.
See also and IOTA forum.
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of IOTA Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
