IOTA Foundation

[Niko]

IOTA Foundation

The IOTA Foundation was incorporated in Germany as a non-profit corporation that coordinates and funds development in the IOTA ecosystem. The Foundation is dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around IOTA to accelerate its development and commercial adoption as an open-source technology. As of November 2017, the Foundation has a $ 100 million fund to promote IOTA use. The funds are distributed as IOTA tokens to companies building technology with IOTA. The development fund does not fund start ups.

The Foundation is the first regulated, non-profit in Germany ("gemeinnützige Stiftung") funded exclusively by cryptocurrencies. It's divided into a Board of Directors, Supervisory Board, and Advisory Board. Beneath them, the Foundation will organized into working groups focused on programming and enabling IOTA's use in: Identity and MyDate; Social Causes; Supply Chain; Mobility; E-Health; Fintech; Smart Cities and Infrastructure; R & D; Interoperability; Energy; Industry 4.0; and Others.

Data marketplace

IOTA launched a public marketplace (https://data.iota.org/) for data generated by 3rd party sensors. The objective is to monetize the exploding market for 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being generated daily and growing exponentially. The project attended participation of over twenty global organizations, including Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Airbus, Cisco, Samsung, Orange S.A., Fujitsu, and China's Huawei Group. Ordinary netizens will also be able to sell their data on the marketplace.

CognIOTA

In September 2017, a distributed machine learning service was announced using IOTAas the payment system. CognIOTA goal is to allow users to rent their idle CPU's for others to use in real time. David Sonstebo commented, "The goal is indeed to get mining pools to switch over to providing a useful service (Machine Learning) while paid in iotas. A lot of mining farms are struggling these days, so this is a very win-win situation


Masked Authenticated Messaging [edit]

Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) is a second layer data communication protocol which enables encrypted data streams, like RSS, to be sent securely over IOTA's distributed ledger. To transmit, a user needs to conduct a small amount of proof of work to prevent spamming of the network. Nodes listening for the channel ID (= address) will receive the message. MAM messages contribute to the security of the network by increasing total hashing power and benefit from the data integrity properties of the network. The Bosch XDK IoT developer kit and the RuuviTag, an open source sensor beacon from Ruuvi Labs, already use IOTA's MAM. Example uses for XDK and RuuviTags are portable weather stations, Eddystone proxies beacons, vehicle locators and similar applications which are strictly report telemetry or receive commands. Another use case are the announced EV charging station from the Dutch energy giant Elaad.

Flash Channels

IOTA allows instantaneous, high throughput payment channels that are bi-directional and off-tangle. This allows parties to transact at high speed without waiting for normal confirmation times. When a channel is created, each party deposits an equal amount of IOTA into a multi-signature address controlled by all parties. Once initial deposits are confirmed, the channel does not need to interact with the network until the channel is closed. When the parties finish transacting, final balances are published to the network. This approach can reduce thousands of transactions down to two.

A sample use is paying for wirelessly charging a phone at a cafe. If the phone and cafe open an IOTA Flash Channel, payments are made by the second from the phone to the cafe. Once the charge is terminated, the channel is closed and one payment is recorded on the Tangle as being connected between your phone and the cafe.