During the last two weeks, IOTA team showed us a great activity as usual. The main point is its partnership with Jaguar Land Rover — the auto company is going to develop the system by which drivers will be able to earn cryptocurrency by sharing road information such as traffic jam, pothole, weather, etc. Furthermore, it is not a secret that David, founder, is a kind of person who likes to stand out, and these weeks are no exception. For instance, David Sønstebø had a couple of talks such as a discussion on Base Layer, the podcast show, where his partner and he talked about IoT future, no transaction fee, etc. As for development, there is only two new feature — Qubic Model Update and Tangle, a new repository which provides developers with a way to set up a development/testing IOTA network using a single command, but it is still ongoing. Moreover, there are two new team members — Dan Simerman, Head of Financial Relations, he is a blockchain investor and technical product manager well versed in consumer psychology, digital assets and open source software development and Lisa Beckers, HR Administrator, so we are looking forward to thier innovation in the company. Last two weeks were wonderful and productive. Again and again, the IOTA team showed us how everybody has to work.
Development
Development is ongoing. Commits on public GitHub appears regularly, several times a day. For example, 8 repositories has been committed last day.
IOTA realized new repository which provides developers with a way to set up a development/testing IOTA network using a single command. It installs a IRI docker container and a Compass docker container. It also includes a pre-built merkle tree with a depth of 20, Enough to let a network run for over a year with 30 second milestone intervals.
If you have a willing to know more about Qubic, check, please, our previous reviews or watch this video — YouTube.
Ict
This month was largely spent cleaning up the latest version and fixing some bugs. Lukas also updated the documentation files to reflect the latest changes.
IXI
All IXI modules now communicate with Ict and each other through the EEE model. Benoit has been working hard on the serialization.IXI, which now has its first stable incarnation. Samuel did more work on the graph.IXI and timestamping.IXI, and started on the weighing.IXI. Lukas created ec.IXI, which now contains the Economic Clustering component for Ict.
FPGA
They have a new addition to the FPGA sub-team. Thomas Serbis (Serbeastio on Discord) has joined as full-time FPGA Design Engineer. This should finally give Donald some much-deserved relief.
For the rest there has been a lot of movement on the FPGA front. They have come to several important insights and are about to embark on a path that creates 3 (!!!) separate implementations of running trinary code on existing binary hardware. It will be interesting to compare these implementations to see which one performs best.
Qupla
IOTA released part 5 and part 6 in the series of articles that explore the depths of the Qubic Computation Model (QCM). Stay tuned for at least two more articles in this series. Team also released an extremely simplified ELI9 article that explains things in layman terms.
The quality of the generated Abra code has been seriously improved by tuning some existing optimizations and adding a few new ones. For the rest a lot of time was spent experimenting with different looping constructs to simplify code that otherwise would have to resort to complex recursion.
These experiments are still ongoing. Development team has also started on a new and improved way of generating optimized Verilog code for FPGA. More on that next month.
Community
They have been able to tap into two more community members that are helping us now with discussions about and contributions to the FPGA implementations.
First there is pmaxuw who had already been creating IOTA-specific FPGAs. And he in turn recommended and recruited Beeef, a seasoned FPGA design engineer whose knowledge, that he willingly shares, is so vast that it has leveled up the entire FPGA team.
There has also been a lot of activity in the #qubic channel on Discord this month with some very interesting discussions. Be sure to read up on them if you haven’t already.
As always, many thanks to everyone who participates there. It’s nice to see all the interest in what company is doing and the questions keep forcing us to come up with answers and fixes to things they might had otherwise missed. Many eyes on this project is how developers manage to not lose sight of anything, no matter how trivial it may seem sometimes.
Social encounters
In the eleventh episode of Untangled they are visiting the world’s biggest blockchain and artificial intelligence hackathon Odyssey, which is the peak of the year for the organizers from Dutchchain, an open innovation program. To hear more about the event, they interviewed the founder himself, Rutger van Zuidam. And to hear more about why the Dutch government takes part in a hackathon and how the development of digital identities is moving ahead, they also interviewed Wouter Welling from the Dutch Interior Ministry. Out of the 99 teams present, 8 of them were using IOTA technology to power their solutions in attempts to solve complex real world problems dictated by a multitude of companies, organizations and ministries. They talked to a couple of them, including Jelle Millenaar from VX Companyand Andre Fialho and David Hawig from PACT Care that were also on the second episode of Untangled, but this time with a different project.
David and Dominik, the founders of IOTA, join Base Layer to discuss IOTA, a cryptocurrency they designed for use in the internet of things, enabling secure sales and trading data streams, with no need of transaction fees and miners to maintain operations. They discuss the differences of the Bitcoin blockchain to IOTA, scalability issues and much more.
David Sønstebø is the founder of IOTA. In this conversation, David and Anthony Pompliano discuss machine to machine transactions, automation, and how digitally native assets, accounting, and contracts fit into the future digital world.
- ELI9: The Qubic Computation Model
- IOTA: Welcome To America
- Introducing RFPs, Grant Updates & New EDF Management.
These weeks events:
- Fireside Chat With Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder Of IOTA took place in NYC, Friday April 26th. More than 100 people attended this event.
According to meetup.com, over 100 people attended the event.
- IOTA Smart City contest on Hackster.io is over on April 27th, 2019. The winners are being selected on May 11, 2019. $10,000 USD in prizes.
- IOTA and Austin — with Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder of IOTA and Guest Speakers
The IOTA Foundation invited everybody to a special event hosted by the University of Texas in the Mulva Auditorium located in the Engineering Education and Research Center started on Monday, 29 April 2019. The event included an introduction by special guest speakers from the City of Austin, followed by an introduction to IOTA by Dominik Schiener, Co-founder of the IOTA Foundation. The livestream included a special announcement on the IOTA Foundations recent progress with the City of Austin, and the future that the IOTA Foundation is working to create in collaboration with the City of Austin. Over than 90 people attended the event and over 1400 people watched the live stream online.
Upcoming events:
- May 2nd, 2019, Chicago Connectory, Chicago: Update on IOTA by Dominik Schiener (IOTA) and Alexander Rieger (Bosch).
- Dominik Schiener will join “The dawn of a data marketplace: How to get a slice of the $3.6 trillion opportunity” panel, TMFDigital meetup, on May 15, 2019, in Nice, France.
Topics:
- Embedding AI technology into enterprise tools to create more valuable interactions and optimization
- Developing sophisticated AI marketing profile calculations
- Incorporating non-traditional data to help you succeed in your business strategy (weather, census, municipality, etc)
Finance
Information from Thetangle.org (May 3rd, 2019):
Wallets:
- Trinity Wallet for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux. Currently in open Beta, yet fully functional (see Development Roadmap). Desktop version was released into Beta on August 25.
- 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.
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
New IOTA Foundation Team Members
- Dan Simerman — Head of Financial Relations:
Dan Simerman is a blockchain investor and technical product manager well versed in consumer psychology, digital assets and open source software development. Dan also has a history of building software for Fortune 50 financial institutions, multinational media companies and strategic consulting firms. According to his LinkedIn page, Dan, Bachelor of Science in Business, Marketing, worked as Consultant at Wells Fargo (2012–2014), Product Strategist at Skookum (2014–2016), Senior Product Manager at Conde Nast (2016–2017).
Lisa lives in Berlin and joins IOTA as a Human Resources Administrator. In her role, she will focus on mastering the administration of the Foundation with employees in more than 20 countries.
During her Bachelor in Economics at the University of Münster and Warsaw School of Economics, she discovered her passion for behavioral economics and game theory. To deepen her knowledge, she decided to take on her Master’s in Human Decision Science at Maastricht University. She wrote her thesis about cryptocurrencies in 2014 and also used cryptocurrencies to finance her studies. She has been fascinated by distributed systems and technologies ever since.
Once she completed her studies, she moved to Berlin and started her career as an Executive Assistant in a Tech Startup. Following her passion for people, she soon moved on to a Human Resources role in an IT infrastructure company, where she focused on recruiting and onboarding IT professionals. Given her interest in interpersonal relationships, she is currently doing training to become a certified mediator.
- See also Open positions at IOTA Foundation.
Ecosystem
Using ‘Smart Wallet’ technology, owners earn credits by enabling their cars to automatically report useful road condition data such as traffic congestion or potholes to navigation providers or local authorities. Drivers could then redeem these for rewards such as coffee, or conveniently use them to automatically pay tolls, parking fees and for smart charging electric vehicles. ‘Smart Wallet’ removes the need for drivers to hunt for loose change or sign up to multiple accounts to pay for a variety of everyday services.
‘Smart Wallet’ uses the latest cryptocurrency technology and Jaguar Land Rover has partnered with the IOTA Foundation to harness ‘distributed ledger’ technologies to make and receive these payments. Unlike other similar systems, due to its structure, it requires no transaction fee to operate and over time transactions will get faster across the entire network, forecast to include some 75 billion connected devices by 2025*. Drivers could also top-up the ‘Smart Wallet’ using conventional payment methods.
“Our distributed ledger technology is perfectly suited to enable machine-to-machine payments for smart charging, parking and tolls, in addition to creating opportunities for drivers to earn their own digital currency. We are excited to partner with Jaguar Land Rover in implementing its IOTA-powered car wallet, delivering a major convenience benefit for their customers worldwide.” — Holger Köther, Director of Partnerships, IOTA Foundation
The IOTA Foundation (IF) has launched its first international IOTA academy program in close cooperation with the IOT1 Academy, a deep tech academy based in Berlin and Shanghai.
Under https://training.iota.org, the IOTA Foundation offers a selection of online trainings as well as blended trainings for coders & developers. In the upcoming weeks, this first set will be complemented by trainings for non-coders, e.g. blockchain enthusiasts, futurists, and students, but also corporate project managers, concepters and c-level managers to enhance their knowledge about IOTA, its technology, and the huge disruptive potential IOTA offers for economy and society as the 3rd generation of distributed ledger technology (DLT).All courses can be purchased online through training.iota.org and come with curated digital content, presented through a Multi Device Learning App for desktop and mobile. This offers a hands-on experience and practical approach through use-cases and code examples.
This cellular IoT power relay is IOTA supported and users can recharge the wallet in order to turn on their electric appliances.
Rumors
Active discussions on IOTA subreddit :
- New people in subreddit Iota — be nice
- Jaguar Land Rover planning to allow helpful car drivers to earn cryptocurrency
- What’s the inflation rate of IOTA?
- Isn’t the Iota powered VW supposed to release soon? Who has some info on that?
Discussions on r/IOTAmarkets:
- hey, why has the price fell so much?
- Sentiment vs actions
- The last time I saw a subreddit as angsty as this one was in December 2017…
- I have the urge feeling I should sell IOTA
- Thoughts? Bitcoin vs. IOTA
- When should I buy some iota?
- And suddenly everyone is excited again.
- The promise of this coin…
- shitpost- what do you think our new ATH is going to be with the next bull run coming up?
- Someone wants to dump Iota in a BIG way. (no not a sell wall to accumulate there is no buy volume)
- Sad but highly likely explanation for the current price dump
Social media metrics
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.
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. Last publication — on April 19th, 2019.
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.
