The story of IOTA is fraught with both drama and exceptionality. IOTA dared to envision the true potential of Distributed Ledger Technology and pursue the vision through all adversity. Even after a 95% market cap decrease and the removal of two founders from the board of directors, IOTA is stronger than ever. In fact, many in the community believe it would be make for a great movie one day.
I believe that IOTA is the elephant in the room, the one that that the majority kind of ignore until they shit their pants when it makes its real position known. The delivery of Chrysalis and Nectar over the next month will be a wake up call that will profoundly resonate through the lagging DLT space.
Infrastructure
IOTA is an infrastructure enabler, one of the main challenges today is that there are disconnected systems, data and processes, this disconnection leads to information and knowledge being siloed. These data silos not only represent a failure in the infrastructure that is currently being utilized but also highlight the lost opportunities.
If connectivity between systems were increased, it is expected that this would increase knowledge and understanding as well as making information more accessible.
This is where the fourth industrial revolution comes in, it is the epitome of future connectivity. Industry 4.0 can only be achieved through the fusion of different technologies and use cases.
For example, an autonomous vehicle would first connect by 5G (or otherwise) to an IOTA full node and have its digital twin’s identity verified by IOTA identity, it would then submit the IOT data as a first party IOTA oracle (using the Alvarium trust fabric) via the standardized IOTA streams protocol according to the eClassOWL ontology, creating a semantic web of metadata which will further enable the machine economy.
After which, IOTA smart contracts can then execute code using the Ethereum virtual machine (or otherwise) and trigger other smart contracts, or even tokenize and pay for data and services. The data held on the tangle can then be ingested by the cloud providers that are connected to the IOTA network and transmitted to data lakes, and processed into data warehouses, graph databases and ERP systems accordingly.
Why IOTA?
Utilizing IOTA as an infrastructure will offer a solid foundation for digital transformation and innovation.
IOTA as a Feeless protocol offers many competitive advantages for enterprises and individuals over other protocols that are currently available. Most other protocols out there have fees baked into them, to provide security etc — however, this can also be a weakness.
It will be incredibly difficult for any protocol that already has fees baked in, to remove them — whereas it will be very easy for a feeless protocol to add optional costs if a certain use cases require it. Other protocols often target for specific use cases, such as smart contracts, or oracles. However the vast majority of ‘cryptocurrencies’ are actually utility tokens which could also be built on the IOTA protocol, just like ERC20 tokens are. IOTA is built to be as agnostic as possible, so that it can handle different smart contracts (virtual machines), oracle and any other use cases that DLT’s enable.
IOTA is in fact, one of the very few original cryptocurrency protocols that have been built from the ground up, and is not a fork etc.
The next question is, would feeless IOTA ERC20 tokens become more valuable than Ethereum ERC20 tokens that have fees? They will offer the same utility, however the committee size can be determined for ISCP (rather than the entire network carrying out all computations).
Using fees as a boot-strapping mechanism to support network activity is probably a good method for emerging DLT, with less controversy than using a coordinator — however such mechanism will likely hinder the long term potential of the protocol, when feeless alternatives are available. It will also make it essentially impossible to implement data only transactions.
Finally, IOTA is GREEN. Compared to other protocols, even Visa etc, IOTA offers a superior solution for digital sustainability.
Usecases
There are a lot of use cases when combining technologies.
Replacement for traditional EDI, and master data solutions.
- Quotations
- Order Confirmations
- Delivery Notes
- Invoicing
- Real-time traceability of items
- Master Data synchronization and automation
Digital Twins and NFT’s
- A Digital representation of a physical item, from an engine to an autonomous vehicle etc. From its conception (drawings), to its construction (bill of materials) and real time sensor readings, interaction through 3d models / GIS maps.
- Providing unique identification of items, physical or otherwise.
Security
- Digital Ghost — to check and enforce the behavior of IoT devices, analyzing past usage to ensure it is not acting differently than expected
- Web of Things (WoT) — to determine what the thing should be able to do, and its parameters.
- Identity of Things (IDoT) — can be used to determine what the “thing” is and that it is verified.
- Digital handshake to secure the connections and record on an immutable ledger — with any subsequent communication using the same signature.
- Cryptographically secure protocol for IoT
- Secure Over the Air (OTA) updates of IoT devices
- Auditing safety critical equipment upon failure
- Tamperproof ledger. (also applicable for emission records etc)
Everything as a Service (Xaas)
- Paying for uptime of equipment, rather than in a lump sum.
- Incentivising manufacturers to make equipment more efficient / less resource intensive through optimised recalibration etc.
Data Marketplaces
- Selling data back to manufacturers or other consumers of the same product, to make predictive maintenance more accurate.
- Buying data such as drawing information, bill of materials
- Paying in micropayments
Machine Learning / AI / Neural Networks
- Predictive maintenance, failure analysis — finding the lowest common denominator (i.e. which machine / batch was faulty).
- Autonomous agents that can find / create inferences on the semantic web
Origin and authenticity of materials
- For example, Norway is banning deforestation — this could have a massive impact on pallets / crates etc if they will need to provide origin information
https://www.ecowatch.com/norway-becomes-worlds-first-country-to-ban-deforestation-1891166989.html - Tracking materials from sanctioned countries etc
Decentralized Finance
- DeFi has been successful, but has been restrictive due to excessive fees. If this is set up on a fee-less protocol, it will lead to many new possibilities.
So Many More
- There are so, so many more usecase for IOTA, I can’t even begin to list them all.
- Reach out on Discord if you have any great ideas, IOTA has an Ecosystem Development Fund exactly for this purpose!
