- The IOTA Foundation has reported on its achievements of the year 2020.
- Co-founder Dominik Schiener announced a budget increase of 300% for 2021.
Several members of the IOTA Foundation have spoken about the achievements, failures, and best moments of 2020. Already looking ahead to its roadmap for 2021, the IOTA Foundation described the year as one that “no one could have predicted”. Highlighting the role that cryptocurrencies have taken during the crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic, IOTA enters a defining stage.
IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener made a presentation entitled “IOTA: A Year of Milestones”. According to Schiener, IOTA has been part of the technologies that have disrupted the traditional market, filling “the gap” left by the crisis. Reflecting on 2020, Schiener explained how IOTA can have a real impact that benefits an entire ecosystem, not a just “shareholder group”:
That’s why crypto currencies and distributed ledger technology and especially IOTA are exciting. Because it’s not just about creating a new technology that is very disruptive, very innovative that actually changes industries. It’s also about having a collective around (…) the people who drive this change with us will also benefit.
IOTA, major milestones in technology and adoption
In that sense, the IOTA co-founder predicted that the subsequent months will be even better in terms of progress and adoption. In 2020, the IOTA Foundation has focused on value creation and on consolidating its vision of building a scalable and fully decentralized network. The Foundation has had two main projects: Chrysalis and Coordicide.
The first phase of Chrysalis has been successfully deployed and is one of the most important technological achievements for the IOTA Foundation in 2020. The second phase is in its public test phase and has a tentative launch date for early 2021.
Speaking about the progress of IOTA 2.0 and the Pollen testnet, Schiener stressed that the audits that will be decisive for the Coordicide deployment on the mainnet. The IOTA co-founder added:
This will really unlock more adoption, especially with the exchanges (…) together with the community we want to shake up the future of IOTA. I think Pollen has been successful so far. I think at its peak we had 200 to 300 nodes participating (in Pollen). I think it’s very exciting and shows how much the community wants to be involved in shaping IOTA and making sure we are on the right track. In the next few weeks there will be exciting software updates (…).
In parallel, the development of these two projects has been the subject of extensive research and the deployment of additional components that have improved and expanded the IOTA ecosystem. Schiener mentioned a few: IOTA Streams, IOTA Access, IOTA Identity, IOTA Smart Contracts, as shown in the image below.
In addition, IOTA developers work on “building blocks”. As part of their main adoption strategy, the IF is focused on creating solutions and use cases for companies, “building blocks” will enable IOTA partners to apply their technology to improve or solve a specific problem.
To achieve these goals, the IOTA Foundation has added more than 110 new members to the Foundation from around the world. 43 were engineers and 14 researchers who formed 24 new teams with the intention of expanding next year.
In terms of the partnerships, the IF has managed to obtain 8 new cooperations and 10 projects with giants such as Jaguar, Lands Rover, Dell, among others. Furthermore, over 100 companies were actively engaged with the IOTA Tangle. This is reflected in the financial status of the organization. Preliminary estimates indicate that the IOTA Foundation expects a 300% increase for the 2021 budget.