In the past seven days, IOTA has climbed the Coin Market Cap ladder and is now sitting at #5, just below Bitcoin Cash (BCH). On Monday, IOTA gained nearly 20%.
Traders are now waiting for the 1$ line, with more then 2849% trade volume growth compared to the August 1 (coinmarketcap.com) IOTA will hopefully perform the long awaited lift-off to the moon!
So what’s behind this leap?
1) Bitfinex statement
On August 11th, Bitfinex released a statement saying they would be closing their doors to U.S. customers.
The announcement sparked panic in the crypto world, with investors flooding the exchange to remove their coins. But it also had an opposite effect. It sent buying of certain digital currencies through the roof.
One such digital currency appears to be IOTA. Bitfinex is the only digital currency exchange trading IOTA. Investors seem to be buying it up in chunks and then hoarding it away.
2) Strong launch to market – Momentum
For the year following open beta testing trading IOTA was limited to over the counter transactions and in June 2017 the IOTA currency was exchange listed for the first time on the Bitfinex exchange – tradable in USD and BTC under the code IOT.
The launch hit a record breaking 1.8billion USD market capitalization level – driving interest and momentum significantly higher which has driven wider adoption over the past 2 months.
3) Tangle technology
The primary, and standout, innovation behind IOTA is the Tangle algorithm. IOTA is the first cryptocurrency to apply the Tangle algorithm and as such has come to be known as the next generation of blockchain and distributed ledger technology. As an open source peer- to peer digital currency system IOTA utilises a protocol based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) called the tangle rather than the traditional blockchain setup that competing cryptocurrencies use.
The primary difference is that the traditional blockchain is a linked list where each block points to the next block in the chain whereas in the tangle, a block links to two previous blocks. This is designed to improve speed and security and has been well received in a wide range of fields to date – further driving IOTA growth.
4) Specialised use cases – Internet of Things
Two extremely valuable use cases for IOT are driving growth in the digital currency and technology –applications in the internet of thing and the machine-to-machine economy – both huge growth areas currently and into the future. The cryptocurrency was specifically designed to facilitate improved transactions processing in these areas and as such IOTA has formed numerous successful corporate collaborations.
Examples include: the decentralized Identity Foundation with Microsoft, Accenture and BigchainDB and the Trusted IoT Alliance with Cisco, Foxconn and Bosch.
The spread of IOTA adoption across a wide use case platform is gaining pace. As recently as August 13th 2017 the IOTA Tangle was applied by prize winning students working with NXP Semiconductors in the inaugural Porsche Innovation Contest on blockchain technology. In this case IOTA was applied in payments processing to successfully facilitate an autonomous payment ecosystem.
5) BitDice
BitDice announced, on 14th August 2017, that it will employ IOTA technology on its next generation platform. BitDice Casino will work to integrate IOTA’s tangle technology into BitDice’s infrastructure specifically to address a number of shortcomings in the current ethereum based setup. Specifically IOTA technology will be applied to help lower execution costs and improve gaming execution speed for dynamic betting.
6) IC3RE
IC3RE, Imperial College, London begun a collaboration in July 2017 with the IOTA Foundation as part of the Outlier Venture research and development programme. This valuable and high profile research with Imperial University has been setup with two core aims – first, to bring the IOTA protocol closer to real-world adoption and second, to increase the utility of this breakthrough approach to distributed ledger technology. Work will be undertaken in areas such as mobility, infrastructure the Internet of Things innovation – all valuable areas driving growth of the IOTA currency and broadening the adoption of the IOTA technology.
IOTA has been working on a number of academic collaborations – for example with the University of California, Berkeley and the University College London’s Centre for blockchain Technologies. These efforts are delivering improved research, tools and use cases – signalling a positive outlook for IOTA moving forward.
Sources:
- https://www.wealthdaily.com/
- https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/
- https://blog.iota.org/
- http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/
- https://medium.com/
