what is iota 
iota miota is a distributed ledger designed to record and execute transactions between machines and devices in the internet of things iot ecosystem the ledger uses a cryptocurrency called miota to account for transactions in its network iota s key innovation is tangle a system of nodes used for confirming transactions iota claims that tangle is faster and more efficient than typical blockchains used in cryptocurrencies the iota foundation the nonprofit foundation responsible for the ledger has inked agreements with prominent companies such as bosch and volkswagen to extend the platform s utility among connected devices understanding iotabillions of devices were connected to the internet by 2020 within this internet of things iot ecosystem devices can exchange data and payment information with multiple other devices in transactions conducted throughout the day iota intends to become the standard mode of conducting transactions on devices its founders have described the ledger as a public permission less backbone for the internet of things that enables interoperability between multiple devices in simple terms this means that it will enable transactions between connected devices and anyone will be able to access it iota s founders claim that it solves multiple problems plaguing cryptocurrencies that are developed on standard blockchains these problems include the centralization of mining to a specific group low network speeds and scalability for cryptocurrencies scalability refers to the problem of increasing the number of transactions processed by a blockchain without affecting other metrics those problems are primarily caused due to a backlog of transactions on bitcoin s blockchain the backlog itself is due to a variety of reasons from small block sizes to the difficulty of puzzles that miners must solve to earn the cryptocurrency as a reward iota solves these problems by reconfiguring the blockchain architecture into tangle a new way of organizing data and confirming transactions history of iotasergey ivancheglo serguei popov david s nsteb and dominik schiener who joined later together co founded iota the project was announced in october 2015 through a post announcing a token sale in an online bitcoin forum 1 the roots of iota go back to the jinn project that project aimed to develop ternary hardware or low cost and energy efficient hardware primarily general purpose processors for use in the iot ecosystem jinn held a crowd sale for its tokens in september 2014 approximately 100 000 tokens were sold during the crowd sale amounting to collections of 250 000 the jinn tokens were soon in hot water because they were marketed as profit sharing tokens which might be seen as security tokens initial coin offerings icos were still gaining traction at that time and there was no clarity about their regulatory status in 2015 jinn was rebranded as iota and another token sale was held the tokens were marketed as utility tokens this time around jinn token holders could exchange their tokens at equivalency in the new system according to david s nsteb iota was spawned due to the jinn project so it only makes sense first to introduce iota and then jinn afterward he said the genesis transaction for iota was an address with a balance that contained all miota its cryptocurrency that will ever be mined but reports state that a snapshot of the genesis transaction is yet to be found online these tokens were dispersed to other founder addresses the total number of miotas planned to be in existence is 27 quadrillion according to iota s founders the total number of miotas fits in nicely with the maximum allowable integer value in javascript a programming language within three months of its debut on cryptocurrency markets miota reached a peak valuation of 14 5 billion during the 2016 2017 bull market however its value later crashed along with most other cryptocurrencies concerns about iotacriticism of iota has mainly centered around its technical flaws as with most cryptocurrencies iota s system is nascent and unproven a phishing attack on its network resulted in the theft of miota worth 3 94 million in response to the attack the iota development team wrote a blog post outlining steps to generate a strong seed for using its cryptocurrency iota s developers are supposed to have rolled their crypto in other words they created their encryption method from scratch forgoing the widely used sha 256 hash function used in bitcoin the team at mit s digital currency initiative found serious vulnerabilities with iota s hash function which is called curl the function produced the same output when it was given two different inputs this property is known as collision and denotes a broken hash function in their analysis of the vulnerability the mit team stated that a bad actor could have destroyed or stolen user funds from tangle with their technique iota s team has corrected the vulnerability there are potential issues with iota s claims to eliminate scalability problems for blockchains through the use of dags vitalik buterin the co founder of ethereum has cast doubt on the ability of hashgraphs the underlying data structures for dag to solve scalability issues as he explains it current versions of hashgraphs do not solve for a blockchain s dependency on computer memory and processing power the scalability of a system using hashgraphs still depends on the capacity and speed of individual computers within its network as of 2020 iota s network used a central server known as a coordinator to ensure transaction security this practice has diluted its claims of being a decentralized system since the introduction of a coordinator has resulted in the introduction of a single point of failure it has also slowed down the network s speed because parallel processing does not occur in a coordinator based system however the iota foundation had a plan called the coordicide to remove the coordinator in the future 2future of iotaalthough iota s market capitalization was still down substantially from its 2017 highs this cryptocurrency s fortunes showed signs of improving by late 2020 it started 2020 with a market capitalization of 446 million and was above 900 million as of dec 19 2020 that s a gain of over 100 but it was a rocky road iota s continued partnership with large corporations and focus on the growing internet of things iot also help to set it apart from other cryptocurrencies and generate investor interest it seems to be working because as of sept 28 2021 iota s market cap is around 3 2 billion 3cryptocurrencies need to offer something different to succeed and iota aims for iot optimization 