IOTA Weekly Newsletter #1

IOTA is gaining more and more momentum. There are a lot of exciting projects and ecosystem developments that have been in the stealth/incubation stage for months and are soon ready to be announced, because of this we will start posting a summary newsletter approximately once per week.

The main focus of the IOTA Team is to enable and develop the first, real-world use cases for Distributed Ledger Technology in IoT and beyond. As part of this effort, we have recently announced our collaborations with Innogy and Ubuntu.

Innogy is a spin-off company of RWE, the second-largest energy company in Germany. Together with Innogy we are working on new Machine Economy use cases, with a specific focus on mobility and smart cities. Announcements about the details of the projects will be made soon. You can read more on Innogy’s blog and Carsten Stöcker’s longer version on the IOTA blog.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, one of the most popular operating systems in the world, is working together with IOTA to enable new telecom-focused applications. In addition to that, we will be part of LimeSDR, which is a new hardware solution to bring down the cost of mobile base stations. We have an entire blog series planned together with Ubuntu.

We were part of this year’s largest gathering for the mobile and telecommunications industry — the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. As part of our collaboration with Ubuntu, we were one of the few chosen technologies that were present at their booth to showcase how IOTA works and can solve some of the industry’s biggest pain points: billing. Our blog post titled “Reimagining Connectivity” will go in-depth about this.

IOTA demonstrations at the Ubuntu booth

Carsten Stöcker, Dominik Schiener and Mervyn G. Maistry representing the IOTA Foundation

Over the last few months, the ecosystem in IOTA has been steadily growing. The GUI Lightwallet has officially been released, which makes it incredibly easy for people to start using IOTA. In addition to that, a group from the community has developed an Android mobile wallet. When it comes to developer tools, most notably is the progress that we’ve made in making IOTA easier to use: we have developed a dedicated Sandbox, client libraries in Javascript, Python, C#, Java and Go, and are working on a dedicated hub for tutorials around IOTA.

Currently, we are finalizing the development of the refactored Java Core client, where we’ve added some major improvements that will increase throughput and overall performance. We expect to do a public stress test in the coming weeks.

In the pipeline, we’ve got numerous blog posts that cover topics such as IOTA’s development roadmap, “Tangle vs Blockchain”, “Economy of Things” and “Reimagining Connectivity”. The simulation software and stress test will also be published very soon. In addition to that, we will make further announcements about some of our corporate partnerships.

You can expect a busy month in April when IOTA will officially unveil itself to the larger community and will start positioning itself as one of the main platforms in the space.