IOTA Starts Bullish Gains

IOTA is off to a strong start this month, experiencing notable gains as markets respond to positive news including the announcement of the IOTA Ecosystem.





The IOTA token, which powers a blockless distributed ledger called the Tangle, reached $2.31 today, according to CoinMarketCap.





At this price, it was up more than 25% from the beginning of May, additional CoinMarketCap figures show.





[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]

Bullish Gains





This is certainly not the first time that IOTA has experienced bullish appreciation, as its price rose more than 400% in 2017, according to CoinMarketCap.





IOTA's innovative distributed ledger has drawn significant attention to the project. The Tangle was designed to address the challenges posed by the blockchain.





While the blockchain separates users (who make transactions) and miners (who confirm transactions), the Tangle combines these groups, requiring users to confirm two transactions for every one they make.





The cryptocurrency's latest gains coincided with a May 1 announcement that the IOTA Ecosystem has gone live. In developing this ecosystem, the IOTA team hoped to foster greater collaboration and development.





IOTA may have also benefited from Cobinhood's recent announcement that it will offer IOTA trading starting May 4.





Security Concerns





While IOTA continues to develop, investors should keep in mind that technologists, researchers and market experts have voiced concerns about the project's security.





In September, MIT researchers discovered that IOTA developers had created their own hash function, Curl. Further, they found out that Curl had a major security vulnerability, which allowed the researchers to forge signatures on IOTA transactions.





The IOTA team fixed the problem, but this situation certainly didn't bolster their reputation. Cryptographers have emphasized that building one's own hashing function is generally not a good idea, emphasizing that it is far better to work with algorithms that have already been proven.



