Transparency

Never before has the IOTA community been asked to accept something so radical and significant while simultaneously having less information than ever. This must change immediately. The extraordinary claims are not supported by a shred of evidence thus far. The grand assertions being presented need to be quantified and elaborated, so the community and ecosystem can take part. When it is stated that “UAE is on board”, what precisely does this entail? Is there an actual binding plan for IOTA to become integral to UAE’s digital blueprint? Are funds allocated and budgets drawn up? Or is there only a potential pilot project? While both prospects would be exciting, they have distinct implications and vastly different scopes. IOTA can not stake its entire future on vague allusions to a rich country being “on board” or “backing IOTA”. Tangible plans and hard facts are desperately and urgently needed. If the level of involvement and plans match the extraordinary ask of the community, disclose it and let it speak for itself; that way, it can serve to unify the community and excite and instill enthusiasm rather than undermine it as it currently does.

In the same vein, who exactly are the contributors, and what justifies them receiving 5% (at current mcap tens of millions of dollars)? Given that no one in the ecosystem was informed or contacted about this, the genuine contributors who have kept IOTA alive for years are not considered contributors here. So who are they, what exactly are they contributing, and at what terms? The community is forced to pick up the bill, so what is being paid for? These rash and hasty decisions are “justified” under the guise that IOTA must suddenly act right now or be left behind and die. Yet, the community is told to wait indefinitely and rendered powerless to act on anything. This is incongruent and erodes the last iota of trust that this decision is rationally informed and remotely good for the project.

Until very recently, the Foundation claimed everything was fine and on track. Why was this recent catastrophic development not shared with the community at all so they could, at the very least, be informed? At BUILD5 and SPYCE5 we collaborate with large international enterprises all the time, so IOTA in this current climate is far from dying. From within IF there are several voices statitng they would continue working on IOTA no matter what, and that they do not agree with either the diagnosis or the treatment presented. This exaggeration to force through a decision has to stop. Without a fundamental level of reciprocal trust between IF, the community, and the broader ecosystem, going forth with this will result in a permanent negative sentiment and lack of involvement in the vaguely defined plans of an Ecosystem Fund and multiple organizations. This would defeat the whole purpose of this from day 1. Rebuilding this trust has to be number one on the agenda, not after the fact, before.

Accountability

While the leadership of IF acknowledges full responsibility for all these issues and professes remorse, tangible actions such as offering to resign or empowering new leaders to prevent this from occurring again remain absent. If the Foundation is genuinely committed to taking responsibility and wishes for the community to mold its trajectory, such steps should be taken immediately. At the end of 2020, I led several official Board decisions within IF that had full support from the Supervisory Board on a financial plan, appointing a CEO/COO, and expanding the Board with experienced people. These were legally binding board decisions that the current leadership inexplicably and consciously chose not to adhere by, causing all of this avoidable mess, so merely offering empty platitudes without presenting concrete solutions is insufficient. Paramount to this process is the current leadership’s willingness to offer to step down fully or partially and enable the community to nominate trustworthy individuals to steer the IOTA Foundation going forth in this new era to get it back from this persistent mismanagement by the current leadership. I don’t care, as long as, at the very least, the board is expanded with experienced long-term veteran community members, ideally, someone who has voiced their disagreements with the current leadership to balance it out. There is a big pool to select from, including people with executive experience from enterprises.

Empowering and involving the ecosystem and community

For many community members and contributors to the ecosystem, it feels as though their individual opinions are overshadowed and the outcome inevitable. However, this perception is far from reality. The power to shape the forthcoming course of action rests firmly in the hands of the community. The measures taken would likely not withstand legal examination by any authoritative body, and the arguments posited would hardly find ground in a court, especially given the expectations for a non-profit open-source foundation under German jurisdiction. I sincerely hope it doesn’t escalate to such extremes, but this situation is extreme. Without community-wide support, this goes nowhere, whereas, with support, it can lead to something good long-term. Rushing this out in 2 weeks and hiding behind a very recent quasi-decentralized Coordinator does not change this context or legal responsibilities. These solid legal foundations are precisely given as the reason for the necessity to set up outside of Germany, so this is the community’s chance to have a say in its future. It’s essential to recognize the community’s substantial influence and decision-making capacity. The community has weathered profound challenges and made difficult decisions before. With transparency and inclusion, this entire debacle can evolve into something the community can get behind.

If the ecosystem and community are going to swallow a pill of this kind, they should at least be able to influence its flavor. Everyone understands that to get buy-in from stakeholders significant enough to warrant this unprecedented action, it must part with a significant sum, but how significant is still up in the air. Furthermore, why should only these unidentified contributors receive tokens? What about the actual known projects that have been with IOTA for years, pouring their time, capital, and energy into bootstrapping on a shoestring budget? If we are to take such drastic action, the very first beneficiaries should surely be them so they can partake in this grand leapfrogging. It makes no sense to ask them to wait for separate funds and structures to be set up while newcomers do not have to wait.

If we are going to fix this, let’s start with the most obvious. Boosting the current ecosystem, fixing leadership and empowering the ecosystem is an opportunity these actions would afford, and that is the silver lining here.

Suggested concrete next steps:

• Publish a transparency report answering who these new stakeholders are, what legal guarantees are in place and how much money is switching hands
• Let the community weigh in on % and the duration of lock-up periods
• Let the community decide which current known actors in IOTA should be eligible for funding
• Expand the Board with at least two new members from the community
• Host an AMA with the Supervisory Board so that the community can verify that they are informed, take full legal responsibility, and hear their perspective

How did the IOTA AS tokens come to be?

When IOTA’s crowdfund was held back in 2015, we put all iotas in existence for sale. No pre-mine, no airdrops, nothing. There was a clause in the ToS stating that you had to claim your iotas within 90 days, and we further iterated this on the forum where the crowdfund took place. We expected everyone to claim. ~99% did. 1% was leftover to linger in custody pending legal regulation wrt. to crypto crowdfunding and moratorium periods, for which there was no precedent at the time.

The remainder of the iotas came from leftover reclaims in 2016 and 2017. The responsibility for these tokens is a lot more ambiguous due to the IOTA Foundation being established at the time.

Why is IOTA AS forced to take legal action against the IOTA Foundation?

As the organization that created and sold the iotas, IOTA AS is the presumed responsible party by all potential claimers in the future. The IOTA Foundation has actively informed claimers to reach out to IOTA AS to solve their claims for months. If IOTA AS no longer has custody of these tokens, it is naturally impossible for IOTA AS to assist anyone in claiming anything, and if the Foundation’s treasury proposal is acted upon there will in fact be nothing to claim for these people. The arbitrary 6-week claiming limit proposed does not resolve this problem, as recently as yesterday morning, before the Chrysalis update, a new person reached out to IOTA AS regarding claims. I informed IOTA Foundation’s community manager Antonio Nardella about this and gave him a new e-mail address to point these people to. These are not only reclaimed claims from 2017, but also ICO claimers from 2015. With the 2021 crypto-boom a lot of people who forgot about their iotas have remembered them. Here is an example from last week

How the hell did we get here?

The IOTA AS tokens were consolidated in 2018, previously being held in custody by Dominik Schiener. ~13 Ti sent to Sergey Ivancheglo, the remainder to be held in custody by IOTA AS. At the end of 2019, I gave the green light to move forward with Chrysalis and abandon the direction Sergey had kept the IOTA project stagnant on. As most community members will remember, this caused him to lash out. In early 2020 this led to his incredulous threats and attempted blackmail to hand him the custody iotas so that he could dump the market. Fortunately, those were not in his possession. IOTA could move forward and the market did not get dumped, which would have bankrupted the IOTA Foundation at the time. At the time there was consensus in the Board and Supervisory Board that if those tokens were ever released from their limbo state, it was obvious that IOTA AS had full discretion over their fate as it had created them in the first place.

The Trinity Hack (what actually happened to the victims?)

Less than a month after the infamous ‘CFB debacle’, the Foundation was yet again scrambling to solve a major problem: the official wallet had an exploit that allowed an attacker to siphon funds. Again the IOTA Foundation’s runway was shrinking by the minute as a consequence of the scandal. In one of several emergency meetings with the Supervisory Board, I suggested that Dominik and I as the biggest holders of IOTA in the Foundation step in to compensate the victims, thus shielding the Foundation’s runway. Dominik declined. After some contemplation, I agreed to do it on my own, potentially utilizing the custody tokens of IOTA AS if it could be solved in a legally sound way. The Foundation rejoiced, at least we could make the victims of the hack whole. This we worked on with IF’s legal department up until my departure.

Here is where the story becomes appalling. When I departed from the IOTA Foundation I was removed instantly from the private Discord channel where we had gathered all the victims and they were informed that IF would find another solution, not requiring me or IOTA AS tokens in the process. 2 of the victims contacted me 2 months later informing me that the IOTA Foundation actively lied to them and defamed me in the process. Rather than make them whole, the IOTA Foundation lied directly to the victims claiming our statements of reimbursing the victims were ‘not sanctioned’. Instead of calling out the Foundation for its disrespectful behavior towards the victims and its defamation and lies about me, I chose to bite my tongue and cheer the organization on to not impede the momentum we were finally gaining again.

Why was this not resolved between IOTA AS and IOTA Foundation?

IOTA AS was never informed. There has been zero communication from the IOTA Foundation to IOTA AS and numerous prior agreements that IOTA AS indeed shall hold custody of said tokens. Active censorship was the IF Board’s strategy with my departure, the trinity hack and this latest move as witnessed yesterday with my removal from the Discord prior to this stunt. As the chairman of non-profit IF, Dominik setup a for-profit for his girlfriend, hired the company and it runs IOTA’s PR and communications. This external entity knew about this plan before veteran IOTA Foundation members. As witnessed in my departure from the Board, the opaqueness of the IOTA Foundation does not allow the truth to come out, instead shaping a false narrative. Since the strategy by the Foundation is to sway the community by distractions and promises of free iotas that don’t belong to them, the truth has to come out this way.

Are you now against IOTA or the IOTA Foundation?

Of course not. This is IOTA AS’ arm being forced and has nothing to do with me. IOTA AS can not retain responsibility for something that no longer exists. I am completely confident that the IOTA technology will succeed. However, the leadership of the IOTA Foundation has proven questionable in several instances, which has caused yet another easily-avoidable drama. Despite numerous instances of grave injustice and drama over the years, I have never stopped championing for IOTA publicly and professionally. No less than 5 days ago I had a good conversation with Holger Köther about partnerships for IOTA in the making. I have bit my tongue to ensure that my personal grievances with a handful of people in IF’s leadership don’t affect IOTA’s growth. However, this is not personal, this is legal and IOTA AS’ hand is forced, as any entity would be in the same situation.

There is no money, so no, this is not about the money.

It’s been more than 6 years since the very first pieces of what would become IOTA was put in place. In that time I have never taken a salary, I invested all my personal capital into making IOTA succeed and still hold more IOTA than any other individual. IOTA has never been about money. IOTA has gone up and down 10–30–50–100x multiple times over the years, it has never affected my actions.

In fact, there is no money, unlike what CFB believes these iotas are not currently an asset in IOTA AS. It is a legal responsibility, IOTA AS is merely a custodian.

What happens now?

I only see two realistic outcomes: either the IOTA Foundation immediately reverts this treasury-fork proposal and limits its self-inducing damage on IOTA, or a messy legal battle and probable investigation(s) of the Foundation seem inevitable. Unfortunately, I doubt the latter will be isolated to the IOTA AS tokens. I believe it’s very likely that this will cascade into all actions by Board members dating back to the Foundations origins wrt. “Big Deal”, Advisory tokens, Hack Victims, impromptu compensation contracts, etc., etc. All transactions and ink trace back to Dominik Schiener personally. These activities have been presumed valid on good faith; that faith is now gone. It’s just sad through and through to witness. After years of hard work by the team at IF and volunteers in the community, it is unfair. I feel bad for those who will be affected by this mindless act.

What should happen to the tokens?

a) The original crowdfund tokens has to remain with IOTA AS to cover potential future claimers.

b) The reclaim tokens should be available at least until Coordicide, after which the priority must be to make the Trinity Hack victims whole as promised.

I elected to wait for the initial panic to subside before demystifying the present state of affairs so that this debacle would not overshadow the significant milestone of Chrysalis / IOTA 1.5 testnet going live in all its glory. Before I elucidate the current situation and my plans moving forth, I have to express gratitude for the flood of support I have received from Foundation members, partners, and the incredible IOTA community.

First, let me quench all concern regarding my well-being; I am fine; in fact, one could say that part of me is relieved. Ever since I initiated the Foundation and embarked on raising the capital necessary to establish and run it, my life has revolved around its success in a borderline monomaniacal fashion. During the most turbulent periods of the past years, this all-consuming task often felt like juggling Sisyphean boulders. However, reflecting on it all, I feel immense pride in what we have built and accomplished with the IOTA Foundation. No regrets.

The IOTA Foundation anno ~2021 comprises sheer talent, raw passion, and a boisterous drive to deliver on our promises. It’s been an absolute privilege and honour to lead and work alongside all team members in my capacity as co-chair of the Board. Through it, I’ve come to know some of the smartest and most talented people I have met in my life. There is not a single shred of doubt in my being that our detailed plans for 2021 will be realized and that finally, we will be able to state: “we did it” not through words but the live network of the world’s first fee-less scalable decentralized distributed ledger.

Over a week has passed since I departed from the IOTA Foundation. I know many of my colleagues from IF and followers in the community were bewildered by this seemingly Kafkaesque development, which has led to asinine speculation both in the community and media. Frankly, the Board’s handling and communication of this situation have been clumsy, panicky and downright unprofessional, allowing ample room for rampant speculation. Ideally, this would have been dealt with internally and a joint statement by the Foundation and myself would be issued, providing our respective perspectives. All the confusion and uncertainty within the Foundation and Community, as well as the inevitable “here we go again” external reputational hit to IOTA would have been avoided; alas, that did not occur, thus these words you are currently reading.

IOTA ≠ IOTA Foundation ≠ IOTA

The “official” reasoning for my departure was communicated on the basis that there was some kind of contradiction between my interests and that of the organization. I categorically reject this blatantly false, dubiously motivated and defamatory depiction of my person. I founded the project, raised the capital for the Foundation, built the initial team, single-handedly selected and empowered every current Board member and have never taken a single cent in compensation. Rather, in context, the truth is that if forced, my number one allegiance is to IOTA.

The IOTA Foundation exists due to and for IOTA, not vice versa. This fact is also reflected in the statutes of the Foundation. The organization’s runway for the past 3 years has been entirely dependent on the IOTA tokens created by IOTA AS in 2015 and solicited by me from the community all the way back in 2016 for the sole purpose of ensuring that the protocol and a fertile crescent for the ecosystem be established. I will not waste the reader’s time by detailing every minuscule domino brick that fell leading to this outcome. Instead, I’ll condense the tension into the three subjects: the IOTA Foundation’s maturation, finances and role.

Maturation

As all growing young organizations with momentum, we were at risk of suffering ‘Founderitis’. It became apparent to me in mid-2018 that we were starting to exhibit worrying symptoms of this and needed a CEO/COO. Despite consensus, this was chronically deprioritized until I again raised the alarm in 2020, this time escalating it to the Supervisory Board, which sided with my stance. Regrettably and inexplicably, the Board repeatedly resisted this, despite me even naming a promising prospect from within IF. Unfortunately, this meant that the maturation of the Board was hampered. Not only did this provide a fertile environment for the past drama to fester, but it also prevented the Foundation from bringing on people with expansive Board member experience, since joining IF meant that you would have to be a full-time employee, which is virtually unheard of in Boards and thus acting as a insurmountable barrier. The consequence of this neglect was that constant drama from the past resurfaced and IF suffering misalignment and delays repeatedly.

Finances

A chief point of contention in the Board this year revolved around finances, or rather the Board’s approach to the subject. Before expounding on this — as a seasoned veteran of this space — I have to pre-emptively counter FUD: No, the IOTA Foundation is not on the verge of bankruptcy. Don’t twist my words to construe a false narrative. That being said, there were multiple instances in the last year where I advocated for liquidation to ensure the Foundation’s runway and independence from the volatile markets. I escalated this to the Supervisory Board which again sided with my stance. When you have over 100 talented and devoted people depending on IF’s finances for their livelihood, winging it is not acceptable. This would evolve into the last major confrontation in the Board, which I’ll get back to in the last point. However, once again I want to reassure everyone that IF is not broke and, due to the aforementioned actions, IF now has a sound strategy and multiple financial models for different scenarios that ensures IOTA’s success.

Role

IOTA has several successive epochs: ideation, initialization, experimentation, adaptation, implementation, standardization, and ultimately widespread adoption and independent innovation. All successful transformative technologies follow a similar trajectory.

The epoch we are currently entering is the implementation and finalization stage of the IOTA protocol. This means that adoption and permission-less innovation sit at the top of the totem pole of priority from a Bird’s-eye view. The IOTA Foundation is equivalent to the Coordinator in many aspects; it was conceived to support IOTA’s success in the early days, but not evolve into a centralized authority of IOTA in perpetuity. The IOTA Foundation is meant to become one of many influential entities in the ecosystem of IOTA.

Personally, I have numerous concepts that I’ve discussed with investors, separate DLT-project leaders, community devs and others as a means to finally break out of our vacuum, build bridges and bring new exciting opportunities, capital and talent into IOTA. I’ll elucidate these in early 2021, but for now I’ll simply summarize it as follows: profitable governance of the committees in IOTA Smart Contracts, Oracle-as-a-Service and Decentralized-Infrastructure as a Service open a cornucopia of opportunities for IOTA. Personally, I am not going to lead these projects as I want these opportunities to benefit the IOTA ecosystem and bring ‘new blood’ into it.

As mentioned in the prior section, the Board started panicking about its negligence of the IF’s finances and decided that these concepts ought to belong to IF, to ensure an “ever-growing” runway at the cost of IOTA’s ecosystem actually growing. This contradicts the ethos of IOTA by default and prevents IOTA from growing similarly as the more successful projects in crypto. Naturally, I vehemently refused this and here we are…

I’ll quote a successful project that utilize and epitomize a similar philosophy as mine re: IF:

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies.

The EF is not a company, or even a traditional non-profit. Their role is not to control or lead Ethereum, nor are they the only organization that funds critical development of Ethereum-related technologies. The EF is one part of a much larger ecosystem.

I rather that IOTA actually succeed than it simply becoming a vehicle for a centralized German organization with multiple subsidiaries wholly-owned by it to grow indefinitely.

Hornet, Iot2tangle, Society2 etc. etc. are successful examples of this vision that has always been instrumental to IOTA’s vision. These principles are instrinsic to IOTA’s success and cannot merely be empty platitudes.

There you have it; my “diverging interests”.

I’ll end this topic with a message to the Board and Supervisory Board which illustrates what’s what:

Dominik
When I got to know you, you were a young flailing entrepreneur hating your life in Südtirol. I took a chance with you and, for the most part, don’t regret giving it to you. We had good times. You have played an important role in the Foundation and been the fellow Board member I have worked with the most. Then shit happened. I will refrain from sharing unsavory details, you know, to return the favor of “respecting privacy”.

I will however, demand that you no longer refer to yourself as a co-founder of IOTA since you had no part in its founding. You were never involved in either developing the theory of the Tangle or the IOTA vision. While we conceived IOTA you had no clue or interest in IoT and played no role in the vision of The Machine Economy, Data Integrity through DLT, Feelessness, etc. You didn’t even know about IOTA when this was fleshed out. I brought you into the project well over a year after its inception; it’s time people know the truth.

Navin
You reached out to me in 2017, begging me to help you secure some iotas at discount in fear of missing the train. Not only did I bring you on the train, I made you one of the conductors, with handsome compensation. I did so for a reason, I used to call you the “dev whisperer,” and I don’t regret that move at all. My only request as you carry on the role I gave you in IF is to make up your mind regarding priorities. Your whispers have become increasingly inaudible. Initially, you promised to be present full-time, but you rarely make it to any of the official meetings, and multiple directors have inquired about this. Now that the Board is down a founder, you will have to refocus and deliver, especially on Tangle EE, where we made you Eclipse Board member to lead it.

Serguei
Ever since CFB and I hired you to work on the Tangle whitepaper, you’ve never ceased to impress me, not only with your mathematical prowess but your genuine passion for elegant and sound theory. When I brought you to the Foundation’s Board, much to Dominik’s dismay, I did so because Research needed a leader, and I felt that only you fit and deserved that role, including the compensation. You delivered. While there’s been some heated situations lately, I hold no grudges. I know you hate politics, drama, and confrontation. We can drink wine and play chess anytime.

Richard & Clint
Both of you have been exemplary from day one. Always available to provide advice or assist in resolving conflicts in the Board. Your wisdom and vast experience are sources of inspiration that I am grateful to have had direct access to. You were forced to make a difficult decision given the limited information at your disposal and peculiar acute circumstances. That was your legal obligation, and you simply fulfilled your duty. I would work with both of you again anytime.

IOTA will prevail and succeed

I have received an overwhelming amount of inquiries pertaining to my future and whether I am going to abandon my project. Let me be absolutely clear: of course not. Not even an iota of chance for that. I will take a few weeks off to enjoy the holidays and new years in a regular fashion for the first time in over half a decade and also finalize IoTIFY’s 2021 plans. There will be further details on my plans for IOTA coming early next year. Don’t worry. I will continue to work on IOTA with Foundation members, community members and external partners.

This is not the dot at the end of the final chapter’s last sentence; it’s merely a comma.

Significant progress has been made on fundamental Coordicide research and its implementation in GoShimmer. You may have noticed that some coordicide modules are already in the process of being added to the IOTA mainnet, including autopeering and object storage. We are well on our way to realising our core goal of a coordinator-free IOTA mainnet.

However, apart from Coordicide, the objective of the IOTA Foundation is to fully optimise the IOTA mainnet pre-Coordicide and offer an enterprise-ready solution to our ecosystem. We have therefore planned for an intermediate update called Chrysalis. This plan was first announced alongside our roadmap, but the scope has since been expanded. This post provides further information on what this upgrade to the IOTA Mainnet entails.

A chrysalis is “the form a caterpillar takes before it emerges from its cocoon as a fully-formed moth or butterfly”. In the context of IOTA, Chrysalis is the mainnet’s intermediate stage before coordicide is complete. To be clear, Chrysalis is separate to the coordicide efforts, and is aimed at improving usability of the current IOTA mainnet prior to coordicide.

Why is this process of adopting major protocol improvements relatively unique to IOTA among permissionless DLTs? The simple answer is the absence of miners. In most permissionless DLTs, the miners’ economic incentives conflict with those of the users of the network. Better throughput and lower latencies can disrupt the fee market miners rely on, and therefore agreeing to upgrade the network may affect their own profitability.

In IOTA, the validators and users are one and the same. There is no stubborn clash of incentives, meaning a much smoother path to network improvements. We will demonstrate this with the upcoming incremental upgrades to the network under Chrysalis.

So what are these incremental upgrades?

• White-flag approach for calculating balances. A simpler, conflict-ignoring approach (valid for the pre-coordicide era) that improves speed and efficiency of tip selection, eliminates certain attacks and significantly reduces the need for reattachments.

• New milestone selection algorithm for the coordinator, focused on allowing the network to support as much CTPS as possible, with higher computational efficiency.

• New URTS tip selection in node software. Significantly faster and more efficient than the current approach.

• Support for a new signature scheme in parallel to WOTS. The network will therefore allow for both quantum resistant one-time signatures and a more commonly used signature scheme allowing re-use of private keys. This will dramatically reduce transaction size, and consequently allow a significant increase in TPS. By introducing a new signature scheme we will also allow for reusable addresses, a very popular request from the community.

• Atomic transactions. Move from the current Bundle construct and use simpler atomic transactions instead. This will reduce network overhead, reduce signature verification burden, improve spam protection and congestion control, and reduce length of Merkle proofs (for future sharding). In addition, it will reduce implementation efforts and increase maintainability of our core node software.

• Switch to UTXO model from the current balance model. Every coin on an address is then uniquely identifiable and every spend names the exact coins that it wants to move. This allows for faster and more exact conflict handling and improves resilience and security of the protocol. In addition, switching to UTXO will make colored coins on IOTA possible. Combined with Mana (Coordicide) in the near future, this makes for a very attractive tokenization model and will further boost the adoption of the IOTA token.

• Switch to an internal binary representation of the trinary transaction. This allows us to work on binary data, for validation, IO and other processing without the need to have many binary-ternary conversions as in the current node software. The bundle hash can still be represented as 243 trits, such that the signing scheme stays the same and no transition of funds is necessary. This should lead to further improvements in performance.

We hope that these changes will make the IOTA mainnet more performant, but also satisfy the requirements of both the human and machine economy. As always we value your input via iota.cafe, Github comments and the IOTA Discord. Every protocol change will be submitted as an RFC (Request for Comment) on our Github over the coming week to give the community the necessary technical implementation details of the proposed changes.

The Engineering team has already prioritized the implementation timeline of these new features and is currently working on a more accurate timeline on when they will be released in our core software.

By now most readers are aware of last night’s circus and CFB’s bewildering petulant actions. Years ago, I’d interpret this nonsense as an invitation to respond in the same vein; however, that was many life lessons ago. At this juncture, I am merely disappointed, accept this as another life lesson, and move on unperturbed. Equanimity of mind is more valuable to me than a transient dopamine surge from petty vengeance. While the IOTA community certainly has every right to feel let down and angered by CFB’s actions, I encourage you all to rather channel that energy into something more conducive towards IOTA’s vision. Adhering to the timeless adage of the internet: “Don’t feed the troll” is the best approach here. There is too much exciting development in IOTA to let this distract from our mission and vision. What follows is the promised letter to the IOTA community that elucidates the many surprising turns of events that have unfolded. Despite last night’s “dramatic” events I elected not to make any significant changes to the letter.

Prologue

Over the past months, in fact almost a whole year, Sergey Ivancheglo aka Come-from-Beyond/CFB (I will refer to him as CFB throughout this post, as this is his preference) grew increasingly frustrated with the direction of the IOTA Foundation and the IOTA project itself. This followed the infamous board drama, and his subsequent failure to lead the “omega” software engineering team (over which he had free reign) to achieve his version of a coordinator-free IOTA. His efforts were in parallel to our research team, fleshing out their own approach to Coordicide. Ultimately his inability to deliver led to his decision to quit the IOTA Foundation, to focus on his private VR/MMO start-up Paracosm. But regardless he kept insisting on having a final say in IOTA’s architecture, to suit his company’s needs — this despite no longer contributing to the project, having divested all of his iotas and declaring so publicly.

In this blog post, I will attempt to chronicle the most pertinent points of the Jinn / IOTA saga from inception until today, as well as providing a glimpse into the future. So let’s start at the beginning…

An unlikely partnership

At the end of 2013, while crypto was still very much in its infancy, the Nxt project was released and quickly garnered a healthy following. It was the first full Proof-of-Stake blockchain and one of the first projects to feature an Asset Exchange, Voting, Aliases, etc. on the blockchain. In many ways, Nxt was a fertile breeding-ground and prototype for several of the current projects in the space. Long before I convinced CFB to reveal that he was the infamous BCNext, he used this alias to state that Nxt was a mere experiment to him, whereas I approached it from the perspective of what problems the technology could solve in the real world. This would also be the place where we met Serguei Popov and Dominik Schiener.

At the very beginning of our relationship, I and CFB usually disagreed on most topics. Whether it was his idea that Einstein was wrong about relativity, his belief in near-death experiences or more concrete topics such as my stance that the exorbitant fees on remittances were amoral and something DLT could be a solution to. However, as we kept talking, we developed a healthy respect for each other’s different perspectives and talents. One fateful day I would casually tell him about a hobbyist VR project me and my cousin had tinkered with a few years earlier which we called “Induced Reality”, it was at this point he would tell me about his background as a game developer and his education in electrical engineering, as well as his life goal of creating the “perfect” VR-MMO, which would require novel technology. While this was certainly intriguing, my primary focus was on the, at the time, nascent field of Edge Computing (Mist Computing as I called it before Fog Computing became the norm). However, the back-end technology required for VR-MMO with low latency and high performance overlapped on several areas with my vision of the Internet-of-Things where sensors compute data on the edge. To make a long story short: Jinn Labs was born and the blueprint of IOTA started to emerge.

Unorthodoxy is the new orthodox

Despite what some people think, the goal of Jinn was not to push ternary for the sake of ternary but to go beyond legacy computation to accommodate for the ever-increasing demand in both sheer quantity as well as the variability of computation (now known in the semiconductor industry as the ‘More than Moore’ paradigm shift). With this, we also made the — at the time-unorthodox — decision to go beyond the von-Neumann architecture, implement asynchronous circuitry and develop a dataflow polymorphic computing architecture. We were under no illusion that this would be an easy undertaking but deemed it absolutely necessary to realize our respective visions of the future. Since then IBM’s TrueNorth, Intel’s Loihi, Xilinix’s ACAP and a plethora of other cutting-edge projects have validated different portions of our vision and decisions. As our unofficial slogan has always been: software drives hardware. Unlike the titan multi-billion dollar companies though, back in 2014 when we started the Jinn project funding for new semiconductors was at an all-time low, but we didn’t mind. We knew we were onto something and were going to pursue it. We had hired our first electrical engineers and went through the usual start-up hustle, including the hatred of all things even peripherally crypto-related by banks, which led to frozen bank accounts, delayed salaries, etc. Good memories. /s

Is ternary the future? Yes, no, maybe.

We knew from day one that ternary would incur a performance debt in the short to medium term just as we knew that spearheading quantum robustness in DLT would also incur a performance penalty. And just as us taking the quantum threat seriously, a lot of people ridiculed it for being sci-fi. Now, years later, every honest person accepts that we were right to be concerned about it. As for ternary, the answer lies in the future. So let’s flesh out this point a little further. Ever since the beginning, we wanted to find a way to make IOTA radix neutral i.e., allowing for both binary and trinary, just as we wanted to make the quantum-resistant signature scheme optional. Still, we had very limited resources, and so we had to prioritize realizing the ‘whole’ vision. Now, years later, with a lot more resources, we are going to implement signature optionality in Chrysalis, which will lead to significant performance improvements, and for the time being, we are implementing binary for the same reasons. Does this mean IOTA is forever abandoning ternary? No, but we accept that right now, with IOTA being the leading contender to become a standardized DLT protocol for IoT and beyond, it is the right thing to do. With that being said, to those that think ternary, like quantum computing, is science fiction, here is some stimulating reading material for you:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

Exhibit D

I could go on and on…

IOTA

As our backgrounds were in Distributed Ledger Technology we naturally contemplated how to incentivize and secure a vision of a globally-distributed computing network. This evolved to become the Machine Economy and Data Integrity layer vision of the Tangle and IOTA. Around the same time Serguei Popov, who had authored the first academic paper on Proof-of-Stake, was tinkering with the idea of using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). We picked up on this and hired him into Jinn Labs to work on this DLT project which became IOTA. Simultaneously I had already been working with Dominik Schiener on a myriad of projects (Exchange, DID, Tipping, Supply Chain, Decentralized Wikipedia) at the time. His hunger for building and achieving reminded me of myself a few years earlier, and his talents and drive were obvious, so I brought him into the project. Now we had a founding team, a blueprint, and a vision. We announced the project in late 2015 and held the crowdfund. Approximately 500 000 USD was raised from a little over 1000 people. A modest sum in comparison to the ludicrous amounts of money raised (wasted) in the ICO-age of 2017, but back in 2015 this was sufficient for us to hire a few more crucial people and build out the first iteration of IOTA.

The next chapters of the IOTA story are quite well-known to the vast majority reading this, so I won’t repeat them. Instead, I will focus on how CFB suddenly chose to go against the direction of the IOTA Foundation and why this letter was penned.

Spoonfeeding logic to a fork.

As IOTA kept progressing, CFB kept distancing himself from the project while simultaneously becoming more erratic and irrational. For every improvement to the protocol we made, he would reject it out of hand, refuse to review it properly, talk with engineers, or explain it. In addition to trolling and spreading nonsense in his own Paracosm Discord, he now started threatening the IOTA Foundation actively. Repeatedly stating that if we didn’t just accept his magical solution (which he never properly described or delivered), he would fork IOTA. Not only would he fork IOTA, but he would also sue the IOTA Foundation and insist that his fork was the ‘real’ IOTA and that he would pursue legal action to secure the IOTA brand (ironically, as most have come to learn, CFB’s brand is legal threats and actions when he doesn’t get what he want). The brand which I single-handedly conceived. I dismissed a lot of this as CFB “being CFB” and tried to reason with him and explain the strategy, to make him understand that no one was abandoning the real vision (hell, it’s our collective vision).

Despite months of effort, all these attempts at avoiding drama fell on deaf ears. In retrospect, at least it bought sufficient time to prove that the IOTA Foundation was delivering software, research, and adoption at an ever-accelerating rate while he was not doing anything. So the inevitable happened: as he was no longer listening to his partner concerning our business, nor any of his co-founders of IOTA, we would have to part ways. I’d give him all Jinn IP, engineers, advisors, brand, whatever, and we’d split Jinn Labs’ token assets on the respective networks. He gets his portion of the tokens on his fork (which I will call Triota until he comes up with a name), while I keep mine on the network he has denounced, divested from and gone to war against. A very fair deal for him. Legally I could pursue everything due to the current shareholding structure, but unlike him, I am not petty. I wanted him to succeed on his own, while IOTA continues to thrive. The latter part of the last sentence is probably why he panicked and went full incoherent rambling madman yesterday and made his most loyal ally his enemy out of nowhere. Ever since CFB’s departure, IOTA has just continued to grow and made great strides in all aspects, and suddenly he wants to own it again. Naturally, that will never happen.

A final personal note:

Since the seed of Jinn and IOTA entered the soil, I have worked nonstop to ensure the success of our vision. Despite a series of trials and tribulations in my family, I have taken no time off. I kept going nonstop. I took my first time off in the summer of 2019 to avoid a complete burnout, a total of two weeks’ vacation over 6+ years. I know my story is mirrored by several other people who are working around the clock to ensure IOTA’s success.

Meanwhile, CFB liquidated his iotas, became a wealthy man, traveled the world, and focused squarely on his company Paracosm. He would also seldom have time to discuss strategy or review anything anymore. He still hasn’t read the Coordicide solution we laid out ten months ago. He rejects it because it’s not his solution. In his mind, he is magically entitled to decide over a project he quit and no longer contributes to, has attempted to sabotage, and declared war against. Despite this, I always defended him, even when he was acting in a manner that was detrimental to IOTA, and ensured that our co-founded company had a viable path to market through IOTA’s success. Up until just a week ago, I was still trying to talk sense to him, to no avail. His betrayal and selfish behavior is not something I accept in my life. I know a lot of people will continue to ask me questions about him, but please respect that I am removing him entirely from my private and professional life and will not entertain his trolling for one second. I will not engage in ad hominem attacks on him and ignore all attempts at baiting me into expressing further sentiments about him. I wish him good luck with Paracosm and Jinn, and that’s that. This letter is my catharsis and final word on this entire debacle.

As this nightmare has finally reached its apex, and I no longer have to carry this burden on my shoulders, I am feeling rejuvenated as I can focus solely on matters that excite me and are productive for our collective vision. IOTA has never been in a better position than right now, with today’s release of GoShimmer we are beginning the exciting journey to deliver the solution to the DLT trilemma, and with Chrysalis we are going to see significant improvements to the performance and usability of the network, allowing users to deploy solutions on the network at an exponential rate. The sheer amount of organic adoption happening at the moment is riveting. The best chapters of IOTA are still to come.

As we celebrate our planet’s latest journey around the sun, it’s once again time to glance in the rearview mirror and contemplate how far we’ve come, before turning our heads towards the grand journey ahead.

It’s impossible to capture the sheer magnitude of the progress achieved this year in a simple blog post. However, if one refrains from arbitrary (read: manipulated) rankings as the metric of success, 2019 represents the most triumphant year for IOTA thus far. By far. All aspects of the project have improved significantly over the past 12 months. Through the past year, the entire ecosystem matured leaps and bounds, setting us all up for an exhilarating 2020.

The IOTA Foundation grew from humble beginnings mere two years ago; the Foundation now represents an international organization with more than 110 devoted professionals. 2019 marks not only the year where IOTA showed how it will achieve its goal (Coordicide) of being the first and only truly scalable and decentralized DLT, but also the time it expanded its vision and made appropriate adjustments to the protocol to accommodate these new goals.

Beyond IF’s achievements, we also witnessed more and more established corporations adopt IOTA, as well as the seeds planted by bold entrepreneurs over the past couple of years starting to germinate. We are confident that 2020 will bloom with new products and start-ups that started in the fertile soil of the IOTA vision. This is a beautiful thing. The old and established synergizing with the new and brave in a whole new paradigm of technology. Currently, our growing ecosystem ranges from historic international conglomerates to barely-getting-started start-ups at the cusp of this new era.

The IOTA Foundation has also continued to build bridges with established academia to boost the crucial research necessary into every part of the project. We have allocated millions of dollars precisely for this and are very happy with the increasing interest from faculties.

Of course, as a true grassroots project, IOTA’s pulse is dependent on a healthy and vibrant community. In the latter half of this year, we have noticed a significant influx of new users. This uptick of activity is observed across all official IOTA platforms. Naturally, we are excited and want to extend a warm welcome to all newcomers!

This year our numero uno priorities were to finalize the theory behind Coordicide and share it for public review, as well as streamlining the IOTA Foundation’s different operations. Both have been a success. Without further ado, let’s review the most crucial developments by the IOTA Foundation in 2019

PROGRESS

· IOTA became Founding Member of International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications IOTA Foundation, and more than 70 partners worldwide are coming together to help create smart global governance frameworks for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. In true IOTA spirit, we founded the European Commission-backed association for DLT applications to ensure that the appropriate experts have a say on regulation and legislation pertaining to the innovations that the leaders of respective DLT projects bring to the table. INATBA nominated our very own Julie Maupin to Chair the Board of Directors.

· We took part at IEEE ICBC in Seoul, South Korea.

Several members of our research team co-authored and presented the paper ‘Achieving Fairness in the Tangle through an Adaptive Rate Control Algorithm.’ The paper, co-authored by Dr. Luigi Vigneri, Senior Research Scientist at IOTA and member of the Coordicide team, proposes a novel algorithm to tackle network congestion and prevention of spam attacks in the Tangle.

· We opened up IOTA Academy.

The IOTA Foundation (IF) launched its first international IOTA academy program in close cooperation with the IOT1 Academy, an in-depth tech academy based in Berlin and Shanghai.

· Hannover Messe 2019

We were excited to see an accelerating number of exhibitors at Hannover Messe (#HM2019), one of the most exciting global exhibitions showcasing the latest news, stories, and trends of the industrial world, using our technology — the Tangle — to demonstrate the benefits of distributed ledger technology. Some companies that used the Tangle included eCl@ss, Topocare, e-shelter, IAMPASS, and Fujitsu.

· IOTA Insights

Continuing the tradition of being the most open and fair DLT project, we went the extra mile to be transparent with the community and share our story, current scenario, and vision through IOTA Insights. Insights is a series for organizations and individuals to learn about IOTA’s key focus areas on a quarterly(ish) basis, with a handy website specifically for updates and content related to the Insights Series.

· We launched the Industry Marketplace, the World’s First Autonomous and Decentralized Marketplace

The new Industry Marketplace, developed with world-leading academics, standardization bodies, enterprises, and thought leaders, is a substantial leap forward in our vision and we have significant plans for its future. The launch was just the first step in this project’s timeline. Working together with enterprise, we are developing an industry standard for decentralized data and service exchange.

· We published the IOTA Industry Marketplace Step-by-Step Guide

After we launched the Industry Marketplace: a vendor and industry-neutral platform developed by IOTA and world-leading innovators, we posted a step-by-step guide for anyone who wants to contribute to the Industry Marketplace by setting up an instance of a Service Requester or a Service Provider.

RESEARCH/GRANTS

· Awarded Grants

IOTA announced three new grantees, all of whom will improve our understanding of our technology, the Tangle, and our ecosystem. The grants were given to Unio, Green IOTA, and Sebastian Mueller.

· 5th Cohort of IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund Grantees

The IOTA Ecosystem team announced six great new grantees, with projects including a full node software written in Go (also known as Hornet), a new semi-permanode solution, a swift library, and awareness building & educational material.

· We awarded Professor Robert Shorten with a Research Grant that will fund academic researchers’ work on the Tangle for a three-year program of research.

· We introduced IOTA.cafe: A Public Research Forum to foster collaboration among team members and external researchers.

COMPETITIONS

· IOTA-backed projects won three of 20 tracks at Odyssey Hackathon 2019, the biggest DLT & AI hackathon in the world. Eight teams participated using our technology in six of the 20 different tracks — with three IOTA-backed projects winning their tracks.

· IOTA Smart City contest on Hackster.io — For this contest, we posed several unique challenges from corporates that are looking toward DLT to help solve the problems their industries are facing. Our technology was used by participants to develop innovative IoT/M2M and data-driven concepts for the smart city environment for an opportunity to win over $10,000 in prizes.

· Industry Marketplace contest on Hackster.io

After our first challenges introducing IOTA and its abilities, we stepped up the challenges of introducing the concept of marketplaces. We challenged developers to create innovative solutions on top of the Industry Marketplace. COORDICIDE PROGRESS

· A Testnet with no Coordinator

In March, we announced the launch of znet, the first iteration of the Coordinator-less testnet.

· Open Source Coordinator on Mainnet

In April, we made significant progress toward a Coordinator-free Tangle with the open-source Coordinator on the main net.

· Blueprint for Coordicide

In May, we unveiled the blueprint for the Coordinator’s removal — a momentous step toward realizing IOTA’s promise as the first decentralized and scalable DLT.

· Open Sourcing of the GoShimmer Prototype

In July, after opening up our Engineering communication channels on Discord, we pushed this approach even further by opening up our Research department’s code on the prototype.

· $5 Million in Grants for Coordicide-related Research

Also, in July, we announced the Coordicide grants with the goal of funding community contributions to our research. By offering grants for Coordicide research, we wanted to attract expertise from academia and other research organizations to propel the growth of the IOTA ecosystem and to further the adoption of the technology.

· Fast Probabilistic Consensus Simulator

In September, we shared the source code of the simulator we use to produce some of the results of FPC. Releasing the FPC simulator to the public allowed us to include the community, open up the technology, and encourage everyone to test in the wild.

· Coordicide Autopeering Module

After opening up the source code of GoShimmer, we were thrilled to see such a grand productive engagement from the community. We were excited to share the source code of the improved redesign of the auto-peering module, and we introduced an algorithm that combines three different variables; one which is verifiable, each one which is unpredictable, and a final one which is related to something scarce.

· Simulation study of FPC

The IOTA Research Department published a research paper on arXiv that studies various properties of the FPC, a distributed consensus protocol, and core module of Coordicide.

SMART WALLET

· Trinity Wallet

In July, we announced the full release of the Trinity wallet on all major mobile and desktop platforms.

· ESP32 Wallet

After the release of CClient v1.0.0-beta, we began the implementation of a hardware wallet based on it.

· Results of the Trinity Security Audit by SIXGEN

We shared the audit results of the security assessment of all desktop and mobile versions (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android) that revealed an overall LOW risk of compromise from external attackers.

PARTNERSHIPS / COLLABORATIONS

· IOTA Partnered with Jaguar Land Rover

We announced our partnership with Jaguar Land Rover and unveiled the advanced connected vehicle and integrated ‘Smart Wallet’ project that has been developed by Jaguar Land Rover at the Shannon R&D facility, Ireland.

· IOTA and Zühlke Partnered to Accelerate Machine-as-a-Service Solutions

We partnered with Zühlke, a service provider for innovation projects across Europe, combining both business and technology expertise, to explore new models for manufacturing, machine-to-machine communication, and real-time payments using IOTA.

· Co-Creating Impact: The IOTA Foundation joined forces with EIT Climate KIC

We officially joined forces, in September, with the European Institute for Technology (EIT) and EIT Climate KIC, the leading bodies of the European Union, to connect and scale sustainable solutions across the continent.

· Toward Open Collaboration: The Linux Foundation and IOTA Foundation join forces through LF Edge

We took our first step toward open collaboration when we joined the Linux Foundation to help complete their stack of technologies to advance their development of a truly interoperable solution set for IoT, Edge and Cloud integration.

· IOTA, Dell Technologies, and the Linux Foundation teamed up for Project Alvarium.

We added strong security and trust capabilities to the Project Alvarium. A collaboration between the IOTA Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and one of their leading members, Dell Technologies, the Project Alvarium, is about creating intrinsic trust across exceedingly diverse systems. The project brings together systems from across the industry, to build a common platform that enables trust from the point of data generation, or on-chip, up to an operational platform.

· Towards Open Collaboration: FIWARE and IOTA join forces for a Smart Digital Future

We signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding with FIWARE for initiating a collaboration.

· IOTA Linked with STMicroelectronics to Accelerate IoT Technology Integration

We partnered with STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, to create a new level of powerful, seamless and cost-effective access to Internet-of-Things (IoT) functionality.

· IOTA joined with payments app Zeux

Payments and banking services app Zeux teamed with us to create a system that will allow users to use MIOTA tokens as payment with merchants that accept Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

· IOTA partners up with Cofoundry, Nova

We announced a partnership with Liverpool-based co-foundery, Nova, working to increase the number of successful startups utilizing the next generation of Distributed Ledger Technology. The programme enables aspiring tech entrepreneurs, through funding and mentorship, to develop innovative new business models using IOTA technology.

· IOTA Foundation Partnered with Crypto Storage AG to offer the first Institutional-Grade IOTA Token Storage Infrastructure Solution

Crypto Storage AG collaborated with us to introduce the first multi-signature storage solution available for the storage of high volumes of IOTA tokens worldwide. This storage solution was designed to meet the needs of financial intermediaries as well as significant partners across a variety of industries working on concepts that use IOTA. This collaboration enables private and public investors, as well as institutional investors and beneficiaries, to securely manage access to their IOTA tokens.

· Energinet and the IOTA Foundation to Drive Internet of Things Integration in the Energy Ecosystem.

We signed a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate in experimentation with the Tangle in the IoT and energy market domains. We are exploring and testing the possible use of our technology in creating new products and services in the energy system centered on using IoT devices to accelerate the green energy transition.

SMART CITY

· We showcased sustainable energy traceability at Powerhouse Energy Positive Building

IOTA was there when the Powerhouse building in Trondheim, the world’s northernmost energy-positive building, officially opened in Norway’s third-largest and most innovative city. In collaboration with ENTRA, the building owners, and many tenants, including Sopra Steria, we demonstrated a Proof of Concept (PoC) developed with Jaguar Land Rover and ENGIE Lab CRIGEN, the corporate center for Research & Development for the major French energy operator, ENGIE Group.

· ElaadNL developed Autonomous Self-Balancing Power Grid using IOTA

ElaadNL, the smart charging infrastructure lab founded by Dutch grid operators, devised a Proof of Concept (PoC) that demonstrates how smart grids can autonomously balance energy consumption using our technology. The PoC, created at the ElaadNL test lab, shares data securely via the Tangle and lets the charging devices themselves decide if they want to help balance the grid load or not.

· EDAG CityBot and IOTA — The Future of Mobility

We have been working together with EDAG on mobility topics such as smart parking for some time. This year another chapter of collaboration began: In the autonomous modular CityBot vehicle concept, our technology is used for secure communications and payments, which enables new digital business models for CityBot owners.

SOCIAL IMPACT AND GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS

· Co-Creating Impact: The IOTA Foundation joined forces with EIT Climate KIC

As a non-profit foundation focused on the positive social impact our technology can have, we want to support the sustainable transformation of our society. We started our participation in EIT Climate KIC´s Deep Demonstration on Long Termism alongside an interdisciplinary group of exciting organizations such as the Technical University of Zurich (ETH), Darkmatter Labs, Luvent Consulting, and the Finland Futures Research Center at the University of Turku among others.

SUPPLY CHAIN

· IOTA-Primority Partnership: Tracking Food Allergens & Improving Consumer Safety

In order to ensure food transparency and consumer safety, we partnered with Primority to collaborate on an easy-to-use and innovative approach combining the best of cutting-edge technologies so that consumers can gain full insights about the allergens they seek to avoid by the simple act of scanning a barcode on just one app on their phone.

· Simply track the provenance and authenticity of your shirt

ALYX, EVRYTHNG, Avery Dennison, and IOTA partnered to deliver the collaboration needed to drive supply chain transparency forward. We delivered one of the key features required for secure and trustworthy end-to-end provenance solution: data integrity to ensure that information at no time can be compromised.

· Applying IOTA in Global Trade and Supply Chains: Mission Possible

We engaged with a large number of stakeholders and discussed a variety of problems that our technology could help solve. We have identified Minimum Viable Ecosystems of actors, and engaged in piloting activities, starting with small Proof of Concepts, all part of a bigger effort aiming to revolutionize the trade community and bring trade processes into the 21st Century.

· Using the Tangle for smart agriculture: The IOTA Foundation teamed up with Future Farm consortium in Norway

Future Farm engaged with us to set up a demo model that can illustrate to all members of the alliance how distributed ledger technologies work and how it can enable collaboration. We built a system that organizes and tracks all input into a grass field and carries that data forward with the digital twins of the round bales.

COMMUNITY

· IOTA Summer Summit 2019

For the second time in history, our entire team gathered for the annual IOTA Summer Summit, on the beautiful coast of the Baltic Sea. Since the last IOTA Summer Summit, the organization has grown tremendously, and now numbers 110+ people, located in 28 countries, made for an eventful week. The main theme of the workshops was to agree on the main strategy for the following year, within and across teams, particularly in relation to Coordicide and technology adoption.

· IOTA supports EU-funded LEDGER to accelerate human-centric DLT solutions

We announced its support of LEDGER, a European Commission-funded project, designed to encourage people working on decentralized technologies.

TECHNICAL PROGRESS

· We Introduced Chronicle — A Permanode Solution.

Chronicle is our official permanode solution. It makes it easy for node owners to store all IOTA transactions in a fast, secure, scalable, and distributed database. Chronicle is used to store the unbounded data flow of the Tangle and make it queryable. In other words, a permanode enables indefinite storage of the Tangle’s entire history and makes that data easily accessible at scale.

· Hub Updated to Easily Integrate IOTA with Your Exchange, Custody Solution, Or Product

We built four new features to make it even easier to integrate IOTA into your exchange, custody solution, or product — our development team was able to integrate into a test exchange in less than 3 hours!

· IOTA Area Codes — A proposal to geo-tag IOTA transactions.

We proposed a new standard that will enable IOTA-based applications to be built around geographic regions. IACs are short, tryte-encoded, location codes that can be used to tag and retrieve IOTA transactions related to specific locations.

· New IOTA Documentation Portal.

We released the first version of the documentation portal with a new user interface to make learning about and building on top of IOTA a much better experience.

· IRI 1.6.0 with Local Snapshots released!

We finished implementing local snapshots, a feature that allows you to run your node without storing the full transaction history. This means faster synchronization, lower system resource requirements, and no more waiting for global snapshots to prune the database.

· Introduced ELI9: The Qubic Computation Model.

We introduced a slightly different approach in Qubic in the spring: the Qubic Computation Model (QCM), to create a more energy-efficient and resilient model for the machine-to-machine economy.

· ELI9: Introduced Azimuth.

A simple explanation (ELI9=explain like I am 9) of Azimuth (also known as NB-PoW) — A different approach to proof of work that we are working on as part of our long-term vision for IOTA.

20/20 vision for 2020

2020 is poised to be the year where IOTA’s core innovation — Tangle — proves itself in all its glory. The theory has been worked out over the past years and finally been nailed down through project “Coordicide”. It is well underway in terms of being implemented in safe stages leading up to a public release (See the roadmap for ETAs).

Our stance is that it is high time that DLT as an industry and movement delivers on its audacious promises. By this point, everyone, including the most ardent Bitcoin maximalists (and other experimental Alpha/Beta DLT proponents), acknowledges the limitations of regular blockchain technology. While virtually all projects aim for ad hoc addendum “second layer” solutions in a desperate attempt to patch the fundamental level-1 flaws of the protocol, IOTA insist on truly solving the core issue on the fundamental level. We have the theory fleshed out, 2020 is when it is put into practice.

In the past 1–2 years we have also set out a strategy to fast track standardization of the Tangle in response to the demand of the industry. We are currently collaborating with several open-source organizations as well as standardization bodies to ensure that IOTA can be standardized and subsequently adopted by the industry at large with as little effort as possible.

IOTA’s real-world demand keeps increasing, so does the demand for financial gateways and infrastructure. This is another focus point for early 2020.

As we turn the page and start to pen this new decade together, we want to invite everyone who is new to the ecosystem to join us as we embark on the most exciting chapter of the IOTA saga yet!

Sergey Ivancheglo, better known as Come-from-Beyond/CFB had planned his resignation from the IOTA Foundation when the Alpha and Omega engineering teams were to be merged at the end of June. As planned Sergey submitted his resignation letter on the 26th of June and stepped down from the Board of Directors. Since then he has handed over some backlogged work in the role of an unofficial advisor to the Foundation but holds no position in the organization.

Sergey Ivancheglo on his departure from the IOTA Foundation

I no longer believe that the IOTA Foundation is the best setting for me to realize what we set out to create back in 2014 and 2015. I have always done my best work in a less rigid environment. I am looking forward to continuing the work on both hardware and software development of IOTA independently. Additionally, my use of free speech has repeatedly been leveraged in unfair attacks against the IOTA Foundation, something I am very tired of. I represent myself and only me when I express myself via personal mediums such as Twitter.

As everyone knows, CFB has been and continues to be one of the most prolific and influential people in crypto and has served an absolutely pivotal role in the IOTA project. We fully supported his decision to depart when he revealed his plans to resume working independently to us back in March. The IOTA Foundation is very grateful to Sergey for all his contributions to the Foundation and looks forward to a fruitful collaboration with him in his role as an independent developer.

A personal note from David

Although I don’t always agree or approve of CFB’s unorthodox actions as it pertains to communication, I fully trust him as my co-founder and nothing has changed in terms of the development of the big picture.

This blog post was planned to be released in a couple of weeks, but due to unforeseen events today we chose to make this public today.

Jake lives in Surrey, the United Kingdom where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in applied languages, including translation, French, Spanish, Arabic, and technical communication. Before IOTA, Jake worked as a technical writer and localization manager for a leading manufacturer of microprocessor-controlled prosthetics as well as a multichannel marketing platform.

Jake is joining IOTA as Technical Writer in the Ecosystem team. In this role, Jake will focus on expanding, updating and ensuring the consistency of the documentation portal.

On joining IOTA

I find that a lot of information in this field is technical and full of new jargon, which makes it difficult for newcomers. My goal as Technical Writer is to write structured content in plain English, which is easy to understand for native and non-native speakers alike.

I love working in an open-source environment. Having feedback and input from the community is a luxury that many in the field don’t have. It’s a novel experience and one that I thoroughly enjoy. I’m honored to work with such great colleagues and I’m looking forward to being a part of the future of IOTA.

We are very happy officially announcing Jake Cahill joining the project, his experience as a technical writer is of great value to the IOTA foundation. The translation of technical knowledge into plain language is key to bring IOTA to the masses as a standard, in that regard Jake has the perfect skill set. Give him a warm welcome!

Lisa lives in Berlin and joins IOTA as a Human Resources Administrator. In her role, she will focus on mastering the administration of the Foundation with employees in more than 20 countries.

During her Bachelor in Economics at the University of Münster and Warsaw School of Economics, she discovered her passion for behavioral economics and game theory. To deepen her knowledge, she decided to take on her Master’s in Human Decision Science at Maastricht University. She wrote her thesis about cryptocurrencies in 2014 and also used cryptocurrencies to finance her studies. She has been fascinated by distributed systems and technologies ever since.

Once she completed her studies, she moved to Berlin and started her career as an Executive Assistant in a Tech Startup. Following her passion for people, she soon moved on to a Human Resources role in an IT infrastructure company, where she focused on recruiting and onboarding IT professionals. Given her interest in interpersonal relationships, she is currently doing training to become a certified mediator.

On joining IOTA

I have been following IOTA for some time and I feel honoured to work with some of the most talented and passionate people in this industry. The position as HR Administrator is a perfect fit, because it allows me to combine my passion for distributed systems and for people.

We are very happy officially announcing Lisa Beckers joining our global HR team, her experience and passion with and for people and the HR field is of great value to the IOTA Foundation. Give her a warm welcome!

Dan Simerman is a blockchain investor and technical product manager well versed in consumer psychology, digital assets and open source software development. He lives in Brooklyn, New York where he has spent the last two years developing frameworks for traditional investors to comprehend investments in blockchain technology. Dan also has a history of building software for Fortune 50 financial institutions, multinational media companies and strategic consulting firms.

Dan has been a vocal advocate and supporter of IOTA since 2017. As a member of the IOTA Evangelist Network, he has worked to engage with local partners to expand awareness of our technology in North America. As co-organizer of IOTA NYC, he has contributed to one of the largest IOTA meetups in the world by developing content to support our ecosystem.

He is joining IOTA as Head of Financial Relations. In this role, Dan will focus on supporting the ability of financial institutions and institutional investors to leverage IOTA’s technology and native currency.

On joining IOTA

As a relatively longtime member of the IOTA ecosystem, it is thrilling to join the Foundation to help push the development of the technology in ways that make it more useful to financial system actors. My goal is to help financial partners understand how IOTA can transform financial services for the better and open up exciting new market opportunities.

IOTA has done a tremendous job building some of the strongest relationships with industry for real world IOT and DLT use-cases. Now, with the creation of this role, IOTA can do the same with global financial markets. This marks a significant step forward in the Foundation’s drive to make IOTA’s open-source technologies the backbone of the new machine-to-machine economy.

I look forward to working with institutions and individuals to realize the financial infrastructure necessary to support the future that IOTA envisions.

Dan has been a valued member of our community for quite some time. He has already proven his ability to communicate the goals and values of IOTA throughout the world. His deep understanding of IOTA, distributed ledger technology, and the needs of the IOTA community will come as an asset as we ramp up our participation with financial partners. Give him a warm welcome!