How to Buy Iota

IOTA is a distributed ledger and cryptocurrency that is open source and was created to work with the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the main goals of IOTA is to improve scalability compared to distributed ledgers on the blockchain.

David Sonstebo, Sergey Ivncheglo, Sergui Popov, and Dominik Schiener created the IOTA ledger in 2015. They funded the initial development with an online crowdsale in which participants bought the IOTA token using other cryptocurrencies. This raised about the equivalent of $500,000 or around 1,300 BTC. The initial investors received the token supply in a pro-rata manner.

Since 2018, the IOTA Foundation has been in charge of the IOTA project. The process of creating the foundation began in 2017 when investors donated 5 percent of the token supply for its endowment and the continued development of IOTA.

In 2018, the foundation became a chartered Stiftung in Berlin. Its official goal is to assist in the development, research, standardization, and education of the IOTA technology. It describes itself as:

"A non-profit foundation developing next-generation protocols for the connected world."

The foundation collaborates with partners and the community to create a "sustainable, real-world impact."

While the IOTA Foundation’s presence means that IOTA is centralized, it also provides reasons to trust it. The foundation is part of:

• The International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) as a board member
• MOBI (mobility open blockchain initiative) as a founding member

The latter of these, MOBI, is a trusted Internet of Things alliance that promotes distributed ledgers and blockchains in regulatory approaches, mobility, and the IoT ecosystem.

Keep in mind that the IOTA Foundation is a non-profit foundation. According to IOTA:

"This gives the IOTA token more trust and value. It ensures we can achieve our vision of creating an open-source, standardized protocol for the world to use."

In addition to the initial 5 percent of tokens that were donated to start the IOTA Foundation, it receives further funding from community donations, contributions from organizations or individuals, and development and research grants.

The foundation’s goals are to:

• Research as well as implement the foundational layer of the protocol
• Standardize the protocol
• Create open-source software that is production-ready
• Educate people on IOTA technologies and its use cases

Governance: The foundation includes a Governing Board, a Supervisory Board to oversee the Governing Board’s performance, and an Advisory Board for independent direction and advice.

The foundation has members in more than 25 countries, with the following leadership:

You can view the full team of 68 on the IOTA Foundation’s website. Many team members have links to their LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, GitHub, and Google Scholar pages.

Brief History of News to Date

If you just want to visualize the price history of IOTA, the following chart does so:

The following are some of the highlights in IOTA’s history:

• October 2015 - Initial token sale announcement made
• June 2017 - IOTA tokens launched at $0.64
• September 2017 – Researchers uncovered the Curl-P-27 security flaw, which was resolved
• IOTA tokens reached a price of over $5 during the hype of late 2017

IOTA has a clear roadmap outlined on its website, with separate sections for technological maturity, user adoption, IOTA 2.0, and IOTA Smart Contracts. At the time of writing, each section had been updated as of the last month or so. This indicates that IOTA regularly updates the roadmap as progress is made or new goals are added.

Iota is a currency for the machine economy, where sensors and smart devices can share data and resources for micropayments

“The IOTA Foundation created the IOTA token to solve a real-world challenge: How do you allow humans and devices to exchange data and services in a future economy?”

The main goal of IOTA is to move information in an inexpensive and fast manner. This is done via the use of tangles, which allow for increased speed of settlement.

One of the core ideas behind IOTA was to incorporate the Internet of Things, which previous projects had not yet done to a large extent. Even before home-based smart assistants like Amazon Echo were commonplace, the founders saw people using items like Fitbits or other internet-connected devices but the data going unused. They saw the same potential in sensors in manufacturing, energy, and health care.

The founders of IOTA saw this unused data as an untapped resource. Companies could use it for analytical purposes if they purchased it. This would provide a benefit for companies that use the data and those that sell it.

IOTA’s vision is to provide fast, scalable transactions involving digital assets as well as data.

What Makes IOTA Special Compared to Other Coins?

No Blockchain

The biggest and most apparent difference between IOTA and most other well-known projects is that it does not use a blockchain. Instead, IOTA relies on tangles or directed acyclic graphs. This method allows IOTA to process transactions in parallel.

That parallel settlement increases the speed of settlement.

No Fees

Another significant difference is that there are no transaction fees for using IOTA. This comes partly from the lack of miners and partly from the overall structure of the technology. While there are no fees, IOTA users do have to do some computational work.

Its Cryptographic Hash Function

Another difference is that instead of using an established cryptographic hash function, IOTA decided to create its own, and use a ternary one. This distinction has led to some criticism, including Olaf Carlson-Wee, the CEO and founder of Polychain Capital saying that:

“This is not a best practice in cryptography.”

Experts are also not fond of creating a new hash function, since it requires rigorous testing and is very hard to achieve.

This criticism does not seem wholly unfounded, given IOTA’s history with its hash function. It had to replace its original Curl-P-27 ternary solution with the existing binary Kerl after the DCI reported vulnerabilities.

Overview – How IOTA Works and How It Is Similar and Different to Other Well-known Coins

IOTA was developed for the IoT, and it features feeless microtransactions, low resource requirements, and tamper-proof data.

As an open-source distributed ledger, IOTA relies on a directed acyclic graph for storing transactions. The system does not use mining for validating transactions. Instead, those who issue a transaction have to approve two past transactions and do a small proof of work. This allows for microtransactions and no fees.

In addition to offering open-source technology, IOTA makes it readily accessible on a dedicated page of its website, which includes currently available technologies and those coming soon. This page is most likely to be useful to developers.

IOTA Token

The IOTA token is the IOTA network’s unit of value. The network has a fixed supply equal to 2,779,530,283,277,761 tokens. Like other cryptocurrencies, you can store IOTA tokens in cryptocurrency wallets that feature a seed that serves as a password.

The token’s design includes fair distribution, meaning that there were no tokens given to founders, no ability to be an early corporate investor, and no locked tokens. The fact that the token does not involve stakers or miners means that you can transact data and value without fees, in the words of IOTA:

“Enabling a variety of use cases no other digital asset can.”

The Tangle

The Tangle is another name for IOTA’s DAG (directed acyclic graph) layer for data integrity and transaction settlement. This layer is a string made up of interlinked individual transactions, with the node participants connecting the transactions. To put it concisely:

“IOTA’s Tangle is an open, feeless and scalable distributed ledger, designed to support frictionless data and value transfer.”

As mentioned, miners do not validate transactions on the Tangle. Instead, participants work together to validate transactions, with every one transaction completed requiring confirmation of two transactions. It is that mechanism that makes IOTA useful for microtransactions, as there are no costs for transactions. Transactions also need a small Proof of Work as a way to avoid spam. This Proof of Work comes in the form of solving a simple cryptographic puzzle, which requires some computational resources.

Some key features of the Tangle include:

• Highly scalable
• Zero-fee transactions
• Low resource requirements
• Distributed
• Fast transactions
• Optional quantum robustness

Transfers

With IOTA, you can transfer data or value. There is a second-layer protocol that authenticates and encrypts messages or the data streams. These are stored and transmitted as zero-value transactions on the Tangle.

All messages reference addresses of follow-up messages, connecting the various messages in the data stream. This also helps with forward secrecy. In other words, it is only possible to follow the data stream from where you entered it.

The Coordinator Node

The fact that IOTA does not have mining makes it more challenging for the network to ensure that a majority of the actors are honest, something that is required to stop network attacks. The coordinator node overcomes this, but also provides centralization. The coordinator node is a unique node that the IOTA Foundation operates. It is responsible for referencing transactions to achieve consensus.

The coordinator node issues transactions with zero value at milestones, which are time intervals. All transactions that are indirectly or directly referenced by milestones are valid according to the network’s nodes.

Trinity Wallet

The official wallet for storing IOTA tokens is the Trinity Wallet. This wallet is user-friendly and available for mobile devices with iOS and Android or as a Desktop Wallet on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Trinity Wallet is also compatible with third-party hardware wallets to add a layer of security.

Instead of charging fees like most cryptocurrencies, IOTA does not have to. Instead, you need to approve two prior transactions and do some proof of work.

This is of huge benefit to Iotas primary use case of micro transactions, as even a small fee would add a significant extra cost.

If also opens up many new possible applications and business models such as per second billing for a true pay per use model given there are no cost or accounting restraints on having many transactions

The absence of fees create many opportunities for a zero marginal cost world, especially in conjunction with solar energy, as envisioned by the economic advisor and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin

With the Chrysalis update completed in August 2020, IOTA can handle 1,000 transactions a second. As a comparison, it was just about 20 transactions per second before the update. Keep in mind that these are maximum figures, and the network is frequently not pushed to that capacity. You can check the current transactions per second at TheTangle.org.

Further updates in late 2020 and early 2021 are expected to increase the speed still further

At the present time, with a transaction speed of up to 1,000 transactions per second, IOTA is more scalable than Ethereum or Bitcoin, but less scalable than some other cryptocurrency projects.

However the nature of Iotas model of having to verify 2 transactions to send one transaction has always led to the belief that the protocol will be highly scalable and that increasing transaction volumes will increase rather than hinder scalability. This has yet to be evidenced in practice however.

IOTA has some security measures built into the system, including the interconnected nature of the messages and data streams. The forward secrecy that comes from messages referencing follow-up messages means that even with the proper decryption key, your access to the data stream is limited to where you entered. It also allows the data stream’s owner to revoke access by changing the decryption key the next time they publish a message. That aspect of IOTA helps the owner control how authorized parties receive data.

IOTA’s security track record is far from impressive, as there have been multiple hacks, scams, and phishing attempts. Over the years, these have resulted in extended downtime and some users losing tokens.

DCI’s Curl-P-27 Criticism

One of the most-frequently-mentioned security vulnerabilities in IOTA is related to its Curl-P-27 hash function and was outlined by Ethan Heilman and Neha Narula, et al. from Boston University and MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, respectively in 2017. This report was the result of the authors quickly and successfully breaking the collision resistance of the Curl-P-27 hash. They did so by creating messages with the same length that hash at the same value. If used maliciously, this exploit could potentially forge signatures in IOTA.

The positive side is that IOTA almost immediately took action to resolve the security vulnerability. On August 7, 2017, IOTA Foundation adjusted the node reference implementation’s hash function to Kerl from the previous Curl-27. This new Kerl hash is a trinary SHA-3 adaptation.

Sergey Ivancheglo, the IOTA co-founder, said that the DCI had found the copy protection from the IOTA protocol. He claims that the practical attack that DCI researchers conducted would only work in a few improbable situations, only potentially affecting a negligible number of users, with the coordinator mode protecting the rest.

There is also a negative to this positive, as many argue that IOTA handled the entire situation poorly. Reports from FT Alphaville indicated that an IOTA founder made legal threats against one of the security researchers involved in the report. The team also reported aggressive language used against journalists who covered the relevant DCI report and a contributor from Forbes.

The resulting controversy and fall-out went so far as the University College London’s Center for Blockchain Technologies severing its ties with the IOTA Foundation, as of April 2018. This was a direct result of legal threats made against the security researchers who participated in the report.

Other noteworthy criticisms of the entire incident included:

• Joi Ito, a former media lab director with IOTA, indicating Sergey Ivancheglo provided “two conflicting explanations” to explain the security bug.
• Kyle Samani, the co-founder of Multicoin capital saying IOTA has among “the worst mgmt. teams in crypto.”
• Jamie Burke, a Venture Capitalist, stating “IOTA has issues, largely around their communications, but we believe in the vision, and we believe in the innovation.”
• Dan Guido, the CEO of Trail of Bits saying: “DCI made some rookie mistakes too, and this is generally why, in other industries, security researchers will hand off bugs to a vulnerability coordinator, like a CERT, to report on their behalf.”

The particularly interesting part of these comments is that while some are pure criticism for IOTA’s handling of the incident, others argue that the project handled it poorly but was not the only one to make a mistake and should not be discounted just for this.

IOTA also released an official response to criticisms regarding its response to the incident, although that received mixed reactions.

M or 13 Attack

Later that same year, in October 2017, IOTA faced another security vulnerability, which was unrelated. This came from a vulnerability known as an M or 13 attack. This bug meant that the tokens of some users were at risk, as part of the private key that had been generated for their specific addresses was revealed.

If people with malicious intent had discovered this, it would have made it much easier for them to use “brute force” hacks to get the rest of the private keys from those addresses, stealing the tokens.

To patch this security vulnerability, the IOTA foundation required that no message hashes that need signing contain 13s. If any did contain a 13, they had to be changed until there were not any.

IOTA also moved the funds that had been potentially at risk due to the partial disclosure of their addresses to new addresses that were under the control of the IOTA Foundation. Users then had to follow a specific application process to get their funds back from the IOTA Foundation.

The Seed-Generator Scam

Yet another security nightmare for IOTA occurred in January 2018, when IOTA tokens totaling more than $10 million were stolen. These were stolen from users who used a seed-creator online to create their seed or password that should protect their IOTA tokens. Several hundred people were affected by this particular incident.

A year after the theft, German and UK law enforcement agencies worked together to arrest a 36-year-old man from Oxford, England, who was allegedly behind it. At the time, Hesse’s State Criminal Police department’s Matthias Krekeler had said that many IOTA community members helped with the investigation, and they only caught the suspect thanks to the sophisticated collaboration of international authorities.”

The Trinity Wallet Attack

The most recent notable security problem involving IOTA began on November 26, 2019, and involved IOTA’s Trinity desktop and mobile wallet. A hacker found a vulnerability in the wallet and compromised more than 50 IOTA seeds, which led to him stealing IOTA tokens with a total value of more than $2 million.

The attack vector was possible via a third-party payment integration, MoonPay. The attacker used a compromised Cloudflare API key to intercept DNS queries, then rolled out his malicious version of the payment service instead of the real one.

MoonPay did not notice the hack until February 10, 2020. At this point, it fixed the vulnerability in the API but still did not let the community know about it. Once the hacker noticed it could not gain access to more seeds and accounts this way, the hacker began clearing funds from the accounts just a day later, February 11.

When the IOTA Foundation heard reports that user wallets were having funds stolen, it closed the coordinator node on February 12. This stopped the hackers from continued theft, but it also shut down all the IOTA cryptocurrency. The IOTA Foundation did not restart the coordinator node until March 10, nearly a full month later.

Before this restart, the IOTA Foundation had a 10-day seed migration period. Until March 7, the users at risk had seven days to move their seeds that may have been compromised to an uncompromised seed. All users who lost tokens were refunded by Sonstebo once their claim had been verified

IOTA is centralized, thanks to the role of the IOTA Foundation and a coordinator node that that foundation operates. That coordinator node is the current method of consensus. Since the coordinator mode is centralized, it is also a single point of failure. This is one of the main criticisms of IOTA.

As Carlson-Wee, the founder of Polychain Capital put it:

“IOTA is not decentralized, even though IOTA makes that claim, because it has a central “coordinator node” that the network needs to operate. If a regulator or a hacker shut down the coordinator node, the network would go down.”

There is no way to argue that IOTA is decentralized, as shutting down the coordinator node to stop the Trinity Wallet attack fully stopped the network.

While most crypto enthusiasts are not fond of centralization, at least the IOTA Foundation maintains a strong reputation. Part of this comes from its previously mentioned position as a board member with INATBA and its status as a founding member of MOBI.

Future Decentralization Plans

The IOTA Foundation has announced plans to get rid of the coordinator node and move towards decentralization; however, this is still in the early stages of development. These plans are for a concept called Coordicide, which IOTA introduced the idea of in November 2018 in blog posts, which included reassurance that the changes will eventually happen, most likely in 2021:

“The Coordinator can and will be removed when our research team is satisfied that we understand the coordinator-free network sufficiently.”

Coordicide should ensure that the network can get rid of the coordinator node but remain secure and stable. The team seems very confident in the strategy’s potential success, but they do not have a clear timeline.

From the start of the Coordicide project, IOTA has outlined four significant challenges:

• Node accountability
• Node discovery and auto peering (safely, efficiently connecting nodes)
• Rate control (ensuring the network does not go past its capacity)
• Consensus

For those interested, IOTA has since released an updated Coordicide whitepaper in January 2020. The paper only included information and updates that the IOTA team had already shared via blog posts and forum discussions at IOTA.cafe, but had not previously been compiled into the whitepaper.

According to the Coordicide website, once the project is complete, IOTA will be:

• Decentralized and permissionless
• Scalable and lightweight
• Quick, with transaction finality in seconds
• Modular and future-proof
• Feeless transactions
• Open-source with reliable governance

Uses

The uses and projects involving IOTA revolve around the Internet of Things. There are uses in automotive industries and smart cities.

Data Marketplace

IOTA launched its data marketplace in 2017. This was a pilot market to connect devices or sensors that buy, sell, or store data. The marketplace initially included at least 20 major global organizations, including Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, Accenture, and Bosch plus university research groups.

The marketplace is designed to appeal to industries like energy, smart cities, supply chain, healthcare, and manufacturing. Examples of the data types available include anonymized healthcare data from wearables and environmental data that is location-specific.

Machine Economy/ Industrial IoT Plus Smart Manufacturing

IOTA describes the use case of “enabling the machine economy.”

“IOTA is poised to play a central role in the next industrial revolution, enabling economic relationships between machines and bridging the human and machine economies.”

IOTA aims to help power the next industrial revolution. The organization says that the so-called Industry 4.0 will have improvements in efficiency and increased connectivity, the latter of which will lead to cross-company value chains to share services and data. It will also need a global payment and communication network to exchange payments and data, which IOTA could provide.

Automotive and Mobility

IOTA has potential applications in the automotive and mobility industries, providing affordable, sustainable, and accessible connected mobility.

Some specific use cases within the industry include:

• Digital Twins: This is a digital record of a vehicle’s life cycle that is recorded in the Tangle. It can help with pay-per-use or usage-based insurance, fraud prevention, and more.
• Electric Mobility Plus Renewable Energy: Electric vehicles can participate in peer-to-peer trading of energy to stabilize energy grids.
• Connected Infrastructure: IOTA can provide secure communication and exchange of payments between the various pieces of connected infrastructure, like vehicles and traffic lights.

Digital Identity

In terms of digital identity, IOTA can provide “trust between individuals, organizations, and things.” This is possible by building on the proposed standards from the W3C for a digital identity framework, which includes holders, issuers, and verifiers.

Some of the industry-specific use cases include:

• Decentralized Identifiers: These are references to DID documents that have public keys to prove ownership. This can be used for authority login, age verification, address validation, and more.
• Identify of Things: This can prove specifications, authenticity, and capabilities before transactions.
• Regulatory Compliance: It can offer a cost-effective method of following GDPR, for example.

Customs and Border Management

IOTA can connect border agencies to overseas customs as well as local traders, allowing for more efficient, smarter trading. This would replace and update outdated processes and paper documents commonly used while offering the efficiency, control, and visibility of the permissionless distributed ledger technology. As IOTA explains:

“IOTA creates “a shared resource.” Traders can own, control, and leverage their data to negotiate better trade deals with business partners. Government agencies can have full control over their data and how it is shared, removing the reliance on third-party infrastructure.”

It can include specific use cases, such as joint inspections and non-stop visibility.

Global Supply Chains and Trade

IOTA can make it easier to collaborate and trust other parts of the supply chain, including governments, traders, logistics, and the end-consumers. The result would be quicker, more cost-effective trading.

E-Health

In healthcare, IOTA can allow for privacy as well as control of data. It would provide trust, security, privacy, and control. Some e-health-specific use cases of IOTA include:

• Remote Patient Monitoring: It could analyze data from health sensors, helping with more accurate, quicker analysis without any recall bias.
• Healthcare Data Exchange: Patients and doctors can seamlessly share data between healthcare providers who traditionally have siloed healthcare records, without worrying about data integrity.
• Research Data Integrity: The immutability of the Tangle can prove the integrity of research data. Thanks to its scalability and lack of fees, participants can record real-world data in real-time, instead of relying on the current episodic report forms.

Smart Cities

IOTA is part of testing for many smart cities, including facilitating local energy trading and developing community grids. IOTA can provide residents with visibility in the city’s work towards improving quality of life.

Projects and Partnerships

There are several large corporations that are currently working on projects that incorporate IOTA.

Tangle EE (Enterprise Edition) Working Group

This project was launched by the IOTA Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation on February 11, 2020. This project aims to help enterprise users who use the IOTA technology, letting these big organizations build their applications on the project. The Eclipse Foundation provides the vendor-neutral governance framework.

The Data Marketplace

As mentioned, 20 major companies initially joined the IOTA Marketplace for data, most of which are names that you likely recognize.

Jaguar Land Rover

Jaguar Land Rover is still in the testing stages of designing software to let owners of its vehicles earn IOTA tokens in exchange for sharing their data. The connected wallet would also allow making micropayments in exchange for services, such as paying tolls.

An example of data that could let drivers earn money is finding and reporting potholes to the relevant urban agency. Or the smart wallet can track energy purchases to confirm and certify that the auto uses green energy.

While this project would be promising for the adoption of IOTA, it has its critics. Izabelle Kaminska, for example, said:

“The impact of the release across the media space was decidedly one presenting the service as a fait accompli. Our interpretation is that it's very unlikely Jaguar will be bringing a smart-wallet-enabled earn-cryptocurrency-as-you-drive offering to the marketplace any time soon.”

Even with the criticisms, the project is moving forward. Jaguar Land Rover is conducting testing in Ireland at its new software engineering base. The technology, including smart wallet functionality, is already in some test vehicles, including the Range Rover Velar and the Jaguar F-Pace. This is just one part of Jaguar Range Rover’s connected services, which are a component of its Destination Zero vision, with zero emissions, congestion, and accidents. The fact that the use of IOTA seems to complement the automaker’s vision for its future gives the project promise in the eyes of some experts.

ElaadNL Smart Charging

ElaadNL created a Smart Charger that is IOTA-enabled, which prevents the need to get separate memberships for various charging networks and organize payments for all of them.

TradeMark East Africa

TradeMark East Africa and the IOTA Foundation are piloting a system to connect border agencies, local traders, and overseas customers. The early results indicate it may increase the region’s GDP by more than 5 percent, thanks to job creation and new economic opportunities.

Linux Foundation’s Alvarium

The Alvarium project that the Linux Foundation formed uses IOTA for validation and immutable storage.

STMicroelectronics

STMicroelectronics created IOTA middleware to use with its boards based on STM32.

Community

According to IOTA, there are more than 250,000 members in the community, including more than 100 specialists.

You can connect with the community across numerous platforms, some of which are run by the IOTA Foundation and the others run by community members.

Wallets

IOTA has an official wallet, the Trinity wallet. However, you can also store IOTA in any wallet that supports the coin, of which there are several. While IOTA is supported in fewer wallets than some other cryptocurrencies, it is still easy to find a wallet to use, with Ledger being the most popular choice among hardware wallets and the official Trinity wallet being the most popular online wallet.

Iota has many strong advocates, especially those of a more business mind who look at the evident enthusiam for the project within the corporate world as evidence of high potential for the prokect:

• Clear Vision: Iota is made to solve real business problems where there is no current solution from traditional currencies and technologies. It therefore has a lot of interest from the business community in their R&D projects
• Numerous Use Cases: The connection to the IoT means that IOTA has numerous use cases, including digital identity, supply chains, mobility, smart cities, energy trading, healthcare and more.
• High Adoption: The fact that projects with big brands, such as Jaguar Land Rover, Bosch, Volkswagen, STM MicroElectronics already exist or are in development is also commonly cited in favor of IOTA.
• Clear Roadmaps: Projects with clear roadmaps tend to be associated with a greater chance of success, in addition to their greater transparency.

Opponents of Iota cite the lack of a proven working product and historical issues as evidence that the vision is just a vision and by no means reality:

• Centralized: One of the most common criticisms of IOTA is its centralization. The coordinator node represents a single point of failure, and it is controlled by the IOTA Foundation. This single point of failure was proven when the coordination node was temporarily shut down in the Trinity Wallet attack.
• Unique Design: Other critics argue that the uniqueness of IOTA makes the future uncertain. They say that the unusual design has not been tested before, so it is still unclear how effective it will be in practice.
• Risks of Address Re-use: There are also criticisms of IOTA related to its one-time signature scheme. This means that when an address is used multiple times, the funds stored at the address become significantly less secure since parts of the private key become exposed.
• Balanced Ternary Implementation: IOTA has the unusual data structure of a balanced ternary implementation, using trits instead of bits. Since all the existing hashes were binary, this required IOTA to create the Curl-P, which led to the security vulnerabilities discussed early and outlined in the DCI report. The switch to Kerl meant that it now uses a binary design, but that is not necessarily compatible with ternary platforms like IOTA. Some critics are concerned that while waiting for the Troika replacement, this leads to vulnerabilities and issues.

In summary, at this stage of its development, Iota has some serious strengths and concerns:

• Purpose / Vision: With a growing number of devices connected to the IoT, a solution like IOTA serves a practical vision.
• Adoption: There are some significant projects and partnerships underway, showing use cases across industries, with only Ethereum having more
• Fees: There are no transaction fees.
• Speed: With the upgrade to Chrysalis, IOTA can handle 1,000 transactions per second.
• Scalability: 1,000 transactions per second is better than some major cryptocurrencies, but more scalability is needed for broader adoption.
• Security: IOTA has had several security vulnerabilities and scandals over the years.
• Decentralization: IOTA is not decentralized, thanks to the coordinator node, which the IOTA Foundation controls.
• Team: The team has varied experience and takes advantage of advisors.

Is IOTA Safe?

IOTA is relatively safe, but you should be aware of the various security vulnerabilities that it has had to fix over the years. A degree of technical expertise is recommended before getting invested.

How to Store IOTA Safely?

Store most of your IOTA in a wallet. The Iota foundation has a wallet called Trinity which can be found at iota.org. The trinity wallet can work in conjunction with the ledger hardware wallet for robust security.

Will IOTA’s Price Go Up?

There is no way to predict if the IOTA price will go up. That said, many experts predict there will be an increase in its price if it can deliver on its plans for Chrysalis part 2 amd Coordicide which would solve many of its existing issues