The months and weeks of speculation came to an end when IOTA finally released details of Qubic. According to the platform, Q is going to be “the most significant contribution to the IOTA stack”.

Simply put, it’s a new era in which a limitless number of use cases could be applied. And Hodling just became such a familiar word.

The IOTA just unleashed a weapon against those accusations that it wouldn’t work for lack of nodes. What the new project will do is to combine a whole host of blockchain mechanisms into one protocol. Now there’s Proof of Stake, Proof of Work, Proof of Bandwidth, and Proof of Honesty, all in the Q network.

Incentivize the community

According to the Qubic team, the protocol offers great incentives for anyone who wishes to run a node. One can let others use their spare computational power for a fee or rent out that extra storage capacity and earn rewards in the form of MIOTA. It, therefore, provides everyone with a chance to offer some service and get paid for the same.

And it doesn’t matter whether you use Asics, GPUs or CPUs. For example, Q-nodes can be used to “give new life to old, abandoned PCs”. These seemingly useless PCs could be put to work, offering a great incentive to miners.

And what it leads to is a massive network where a whole community could earn rewards using the oracles system, the smart contracts or from other users who buy computational resources.

New era begins

It is expected the project will take two years of further development before finally being deployed on the Tangle. The excitement with the Iota community is understandably palpable. According to Alexander Renz on LinkedIn,

“Qubic introduces not only oracles and smart contracts, but quorum-based computations, a form of distributed computing. It essentially makes the IOTA Tangle programmable and leverages the data transfer protocol and peer-to-peer fee-less microtransactions to create incentives for outsourced computations using zero-fee micro-transactions.”

There’s a possibility no other platform could achieve IoT and M2M as it is envisioned by the IOTA Foundation via the Qubic project. Alexander believes it’ll completely change the game.

He goes on to say that “In the future, Qubic will leverage the worldwide available, unused computation capacity to solve all kinds of computational problems.”

Messaging and payment app

Qubic began in 2012 as an idea to have a Quorum-based coin. However, that changed over time, evolving into the current form that sees it become a “working protocol to serve as the messaging and payment system: IOTA.”

Qubic follows in the footsteps of the original idea behind IOTA- to enable communication and payments in an IoT ecosystem. Indeed, the project’s team acknowledges that it’s been made possible as a result of the fee-free transactions on the IOTA network.

Qubic works as a powerful distributed fog-computing platform. It’s useful in the creation of complex IoT applications, and a new generation type of smart contracts. Furthermore, the network is designed to automatically collect micro-payments as it works and in real time.

IOTA (MIOTA) and the market

The excitement over the release of the Qubic project was a perfect event for the coin. It should, under normal circumstances, have helped push MIOTA prices a little higher. However, that hasn’t happened and the coin’s prices tanked further today.

Like many other cryptocurrencies, IOTA had a very good end to the month of May. On May 29th, the coin traded at $136 against the US dollar. It rose within the three days to hit a new high of $2.00 on June 3, 2018. It later leveled off and closed the day at $181.

Today it’s trading at $1.71 (at the time of writing), has seen its value decline by 5.94% in the last 24 hours. That is the case over 24 hours, but in the last 7 days, the coin has seen a price growth of +20%.

The token remains in 9th position with a market cap of $4.75 billion and a 24-hour trading volume of $116 million.

Even though the market hasn’t responded to the event as though, one thing is not in doubt: the future of IOTA (MIOTA) appears better. What does that mean? HODL.