At a time when cryptocurrency was synonymous with blockchain technology, IOTA proposed a modification.
As the name suggests, IOTA wanted to be a cryptocurrency for the future of the Internet of Things (IoT). But its founders thought that the blockchain “Transaction times that are too sluggish and charges exploding” to supply the world of networked devices with power. Instead, they introduced a new distributed ledger technology based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) – and called it Tangle.
As a participant, if you want to make a transaction on Tangle, you need to randomly select two previous transactions, validate them, and then link them to your own transaction. The reward for doing this would be to have your own transaction verified by subsequent participants. This means that, unlike most cryptocurrencies, there are no fees for IOTA transactions.
The difference between blockchain and tangle as IOTA explains. With each participant reviewing the other transactions, the network leads to a web instead of a chain. Source: iota.org
So what’s stopping IOTA from dominating the cryptocurrency market? In order for Tangle to work as intended, IOTA must first scale – and this has not yet been the case.
Additional concerns have been raised about IOTA by many industry experts. MIT’s director of the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), Neha Narula, pointed out several cryptography vulnerabilities at Tangle. Ethereum developer Nick Johnson called IOTA a “bad actor” in the open source community, claiming that it disregards cryptographic best practices. Critics have also repeatedly argued that IOTA is, in fact, centralized.
MIOTA / USD performance overview
MIOTA, IOTA’s native cryptocurrency, opened 2018 at $3.56 – a nearly 500 percent increase in price since trading began last June. Most of this growth was accumulated in November-December during the “crypto boom”.
MIOTA’s performance in 2017. The cryptocurrency started trading in June and held its price until the November-December crypto boom where it made the majority of its profits. Data source: eToro.com
MIOTA traded above $ 3.50 for much of the first half of January, but then saw a sharp drop – 25 percent on Jan. 16, from $ 3.47 to $ 2.60. On February 1, it was trading at less than $ 2.
MIOTA started 2018 well, but it only lasted 15 days! In February, the cryptocurrency began to experience massive market corrections. Data source: eToro.com
The MIOTA market saw a slight rebound in mid-February, trading back above $ 2, but saw a quick correction between February 21 and 23, bringing the price back down to $ 1.60.
From mid-April the price of MIOTA recovered and reached. $2.58 on May 4th when the bull run broke. On May 11, MIOTA was back below $ 2 at $ 1.86 – a 28 percent decline over the week.
The MIOTA market price recovered briefly from April to May, but was subsequently corrected. Data source: eToro.com
MIOTA continued a dominant downward trend in the second half of the year. The cryptocurrency was trading for less than a dollar in late June. On August 15th, MIOTA was trading at $0.45 – an 87 percent drop in the market price since the start of the year.
The second quarter of 2018 did not bring good news for MIOTA as the cryptocurrency continued to decline. Until the end of this year, it will trade at half price when it first launched. Data source: eToro.com
Starting in mid-August, MIOTA maintained relative price stability for the remainder of the year, although there was a slump in November. MIOTA has been trading at $ 0.32 since December last week. The market price of the cryptocurrency fell 91 percent through 2018 and has lost nearly half of its price since the day it first traded in June 2017.
MIOTA also performed poorly against BTC in 2018, with the MIOTA / BTC pair losing 64 percent of their value over the course of the year.
MIOTA was unable to hold its price compared to BTC in 2018, but recovered slightly towards the middle of the year. Data Source; coinmarketcap.com
IOTA – major events in 2018
In February, the government of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, announced that it was working with IOTA on its digital citizen identification project.
The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) also partnered with IOTA in April to see how its decentralized ledger technology Tangle could help the organization streamline its operations.
In April, IOTA presented a “juice bar robot” in partnership with the IT service company DXC Technology Hannover-Messe-Industrie trade fair – shows Tangle’s Integration for secure digital transformation services. Later that month, University College London (UCL) severed ties with the IOTA Foundation in their open security research project. IOTA has also been plagued by several controversies related to internal disputes between team members.
In November, the IOTA Foundation announced a partnership with Ledger to integrate their MIOTA tokens into the company’s hardware wallets. The foundation also announced the creation of a new research council to support the IOTA project.
In December, the organization teamed up with cybersecurity firm Cybercrypt to develop a new hash function called Troika, which will pronounce a $ 220,000 bounty for anyone who helps find bugs in their security system.
What to expect in 2019
In the past year and a half, few cryptocurrencies have garnered nearly as much controversy as IOTA. Whether failed partnerships, internal disputes or criticism of technology. Nevertheless, IOTA has managed to remain one of the most powerful coins.
Much of IOTA’s future depends on whether it can successfully prove to critics that Tangle actually enables real-time transactions in a time- and cost-efficient manner, as it promises, without compromising cryptographic principles.
IOTA’s market price movements show that they are relying on general cryptocurrency sentiment rather than individual performance. Although this applies to most cryptocurrencies, the trend is comparatively stronger at IOTA.
IOTA is also one of the few top cryptocurrencies to trade at a lower price in late 2018 than when it was launched, which does not apply to its contemporaries like Binance Coin (BNB) and NEO (NEO).
2019 could turn out to be a “make it” – or “break it” year for IOTA – potentially making it one of the more volatile investment options in cryptocurrencies.
Now that you have actionable information about the future of IOTA, it is time to invest. With eToro, a leading social trading platform, allows you to trade manually or copy the actions of leading traders, which takes a lot of the stress and work out of your investments.
Comments are closed.