History
2015
IOTA founded by David Sonstebo, Sergey Ivancheglo, Dominik Schiener, and Dr. Serguei Popov. The fixed supply of 2,779,530,283,277,761 IOTA cryptocurrency coins were created. As there is no mining, no more IOTA coins will be created. A few months later, IOTA began open beta testing.
2016
While beta testing continued, trading began over-the-counter between users and the next 11 months or so.
2017 [
In May, IOTA announced a $ 10 million ecosystem fund to promote greater corporate partnerships, community projects, and developer acquisition initiatives. By June, IOTA cryptocurrency was listed by its first exchange: Bitfinex Outlier Ventures, a venture capital firm, invested 7 figures into IOTA, their first direct investment into a distributed ledger technology. SatoshiPay announced a transition from the use of bitcoin to the use of IOTA as the transaction cost of bitcoins increase.
By August, the IOTA Foundation forged a partnership with REFUNITE, the world's largest missing persons database, in order to use IOTA technology to help reunite families during and after conflicts. Additionally, IOTA's Flash Network (supporting extreme high speed, instantaneous nano payments) became active, ahead of Bitcoin and Ethereum's versions. Monster Cleaning Services, a London UK based company, announced that they are accepting IOTA as a payment. Sopra Steria announced a partnership with IOTA to create a framework to optimize security between devices on the Internet of Things.
In November, the IOTA Foundation was officially announced as a registered not-for-profit entity under German law. LATTICE80, a Singapore based Fintech hub and largest of its kind, cemented an agreement to open an IOTA innovation lab for the Internet of Things. Additionally, IOTA hired Cybercrypt ApS to develop IOTA's hash technology (Curl), to its next phase.