By Anthony Mandelli
The IOTA Foundation has been making waves in the distributed ledger and IoT worlds, with its innovative approach to solving the scalability issues traditionally faced by blockchain-protocols.
The Tangle, IOTA’s direct acyclic graph-based distributed network, has demonstrated the power and flexibility founder David Sonstebo set out to deliver. As IOTA has grown along with interest in decentralised applications, and a parallel increase in the widespread desire for a commercial Internet of Things infrastructure, more organisations have come on board to further distributed ledger research utilising the Foundation’s platform.
Gaining Momentum
The addition of IOTA’s latest partners comes not long after the announcement of historic collaboration with healthcare providers in Norway and student-driven research groups at UCL and UC Berkeley. A pivotal moment in IOTA’s development, these partnerships allow for the continued researching of the potential of the Tangle to be applied to across a variety of industries and use-cases. “Getting academics and students involved is vital,” said Sonstebo in reference to IOTA’s latest team-ups.
The Imperial Imperative
Continuing the trend of academic alliances, the IOTA Foundation has entered into a partnership with the renowned Imperial College London’s Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering (IC3RE) as part of the ongoing research efforts in conjunction with Outlier Ventures. This partnership will tap some of the brightest minds studying cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technologies to “conceptualise and build new proof of concepts on top of the IOTA protocol,” as per the recent press release.
Dr Catherine Mulligan, Co-Director of IC3RE, said:
The IOTA protocol is an extremely exciting new approach to distributed ledger technology that promises huge scalability and economic improvements over traditional blockchains.
Growing the Ecosystem
Along with academic research, the IOTA Foundation is actively developing the Tangle ecosystem in an effort to create an environment that’s functional, as well as attractive to enterprise and individual users.
To further this growth, the Foundation established the IOTA Ecosystem Fund, a fund dedicated to supporting the development of new proof of concepts and applications built for the Tangle. Looking to exponentially amplify the effect of the Ecosystem Fund, the IOTA Foundation has teamed up with F6S, the world’s premier platform for founders, startups, and accelerators which boasts a roster of over two million developers.
“We are naturally very excited about this partnership,” Sonstebo said in a blog post announcing the collaboration, “and look forward to the results of having a whole new passionate community merge with our own.”
