As a matter of fact, IOTA is really the foundation/stepping stone for the more ambitious Qubic project. Qubic is the IOTA solution to oracles (data providers external to the system), 'smart contracts' (called qubits here), and outsourced/distributed computations. The tangle is essentially IOTA's data transport/communication layer between devices and the backbone foundation for more sophisticated compositions and layers of functionality.Ī visual simulation of the tangle, with adjustable parameters, can be found here.Ī tangle visualizer (of main, test, and spam nets) can be found here. Instead of miners validating and serially appending transactions on a single lane (i.e., the canonical ledger) and pocketing fees in return, in IOTA every transaction must reference two previous transactions in a pay-it-forward manner which allows for fast, feeless transactions and thus, minimal friction (an important property for attaining perfect information in a complete market). Unlike the deterministic world of walled-off blockchain systems, the tangle is designed to deal with probabilities (i.e., is Bayesian in nature). The tangle is a complex mathematical object with a random structure defined by a distinct random agent, a random walk. IOTA's idiosyncratic ledger-of-everything is a DAG-valued stochastic process called the tangle. It has been noted that ternary logic gates more closely/accurately mirror/reflect how actual neurons in a nervous system process data, its capacity to contain more in less relevant to systems economies and self-sustainable/self-organizing complex assemblies (among the components necessary for enabling entire cities to operate within a technological mesh). Since hardware/processors in use today employ binary (zeroes and ones), while balanced ternary (-1, 0, 1) is mostly limited to specialized custom hardware in research labs, IOTA's hardware component - the trinary JINN microprocessor, intended to support large-scale distributed computing, is integral to the project's vision and has been quietly in the making since 2014 (IOTA's reference implementation presently emulating ternary logic on binary circuitry). IOTA combines a number of exotic technologies in what is often seen as an unconventional and unorthodox approach to distributed systems design and engineering - its choice of ternary-based logic circuitry baffles many. As an entity, IOTA itself is based/registered as a non-profit foundation in Berlin, Germany and dedicated to developing industry standards and open-source protocols for the IoT - a largely uncharted territory, but one of critical importance in the future world on the horizon (just like quantum-proof cryptography) that will inevitably determine and shape the dynamics of interaction and nature of governance in many domains, both institutional and socio-technical/socio-economic. Other founding members include Mathematics Professor Serguei Popov and Norwegian David Sønstebø.

One of IOTA's core founders, Belarus-based Sergei Ivancheglo (better known as Come-from-Beyond), is well-known in the 'crypto' community since the early days of and as the creator of the NXT platform, which marked the first successful implementation of a Proof-of-Stake consensus. 'Typically information is defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge' (Rowley, 2007).

The DIKW Pyramid/Hierarchy is used to represent the structural-functional relationships between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

As such, IOTA focuses on the emerging machine-to-machine economies and their associated markets (e.g., data-driven insights marketplace, machine learning, and AI, outsourced computations and fog computing, etc.) - 'data is the new crude', as is often said these days. IOTA is particularly geared towards the future landscape of the Internet-of-Things and the explosion of constantly absorbed data accompanying those networks of connected devices (e.g., sensors and actuators) on a global scale. DAGs generally allow for much more flexibility and a range of possible implementations (of algorithms, programs, strategies, etc.) in a wide variety of conceivable applications and scenarios.ĭAG: chains of transactions without blocks. IOTA instead employs a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) topology in how inter-dependencies and relationships between events occurring are structured in the distributed ledger, whose function is to guarantee the integrity of the data flowing within the system. IOTA is neither blockchain-based nor driven by any of the commonly strapped consensus protocols that coordinate activity and designate roles within the network/system (such as Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, etc.) IOTA is one undertaking in the so-called 'crypto-currency' or distributed ledger tech space that stands out as its own sui generis category.

Iota tangle visualizer