Ultimately, IOTA will be on all exchanges soon (hopefully):

David said in his New Year’s outlook:

However, we are now happy to confirm that several large and small exchanges are done with the technical implementation of IOTA. From here on it is up to the respective parties as businesses to decide when and how they plan to unveil and launch IOTA on their platforms, but we expect most to do this in the very beginning of 2018

So looking at the potential that exchange-listings would have price-wise and knowing that exchanges are already waiting to list it, it doesn’t make sense to sell IOTAs right now. Imagine Bittrex, Poloniex, Bithumb, Coinbase and the likes listing IOTA — it would certainly do good for the price.

4. Partnerships

So far, not much has been disclosed as far as real partnerships are concerned (although this is a lot more than 99% of all the other cryptos combined!). I don’t want to talk here about the partnerships that have been confirmed (a good summary can be found here); instead, I would like to hint to some interesting aspects.

Disclaimer: The following is just my line of thought, nothing of it has been confirmed so far, but I would consider this interesting:

Finance sector

Asked at an IOTA meetup, Oliver Bussmann (a renowned finance expert), revealed that IOTA foundation is in “serious discussions with central banks to introduce an e-currency” (direct link):

This in itself is really interesting. But adding to it, Per Lind, another IOTA foundation member tweeted in October that IOTA is in talks with national banks:

Looking at the news the tweet refers to you will see that it deals with the Bank of England. Intrestingly enough, an article was published last week by the Telegraph stating that this Bank “plots its own bitcoin-style currency”.

Of course, Lind did not confirm this:

But he liked the tweet asking about if this has something to do with IOTA…

Looking at what banks like the Deutsche Bank (Germany’s biggest bank) have to say about IOTA is also interesting:

In conclusion: IOTA has solved the fundamental problems of blockchain, because it is scalable and does not cause any costs. The problem is, that this payment system only works if cryptocurrencies are compatible with each other, because IOTA does not have blocks and chains.

The full analysis from December 2017 can be found here.

I’ll leave it to the reader to draw his/her own conclusions from this ;).

Autonomous Driving

This is of course a huge field which all of the big car companies are focussing on right now. It has long been known that IOTA wants to be the main protocol for doing the IoT-related work as a settlement layer, yet Dominik went into more detail lately:

December 21, 2017

This in itself means that further partnerships will be revealed and looking at the market this whole AV-technology holds, it will be of big impact on IOTAs reputation.

5. Q

The last major aspect in terms of price-development is Q.

So far, probably only the core-foundation-members know about Q, but nonetheless, some bits have come to light:

He even refered to it in his outlook on IOTA which you can read here.

Moreover, CFB (aka BCNext, inventor of NXT) has hinted a couple of times to the effect Q will have once it is published:

As I said, nobody knows, but all of the devs who have spoken about Q have called it something really huge which is to happen in “Q1 2018”. So it remains to be seen what this is about.

So looking at the above-mentioned aspects it is more than clear that IOTA will have a very good time in 2018. Dominik even mentioned that probably in Q2 2018 there will be a conference held (most likely in Berlin) with all partners showcasing their Proof-of-concepts (I don’t have the proof for this because the Slack history doesn’t date back that far).

In case someone still feels uncomfortable with the investment: do you really think companies of that size and influence would even care to talk to some wannabe-developers who cannot deliver on their promises? Would they even invest 1 dollar to waste their time with it if they were not absolutely sure that this thing has potential?

So it is all to the IOTA-tokens-holder to either keep or sell them — with regard to what is up for IOTA in 2018 I hope I could help with that decision ;-)

If you like this or new article on IOTA I would be happy about a little donation ;-):

IOTA: KGOZYHJRYVDBSXTUSECYJVEBLDVYFKCAKAWTPTCKXMBNOWNVRDRHRVSJNIVOQUFRODFPXWYSGROKRWKRZWJZTJOHSX