It has a market capitalisation of $5bn, it sits comfortably as one of cryptocurrency’s top ten coins, and yet it still qualifies as nothing more than an abstraction in its current form.

Designed as a piece of technology that anticipates the impending machine economy — where intelligent IoT devices collaborate, communicate and trade with each other without direct intervention from humans — it is also still in what can only reasonably be called its conceptual stage.

However, IOTA continues to attract large numbers of developers from the open source community who are currently building libraries in a whole host of languages, from Python through to Javascript, in preparation for what they believe is the technology’s impending mass adoption.

Better Consensus Mechanism Required

One such developer, sitting on the IOTA development ‘periphery’ — working independently of the IOTA Foundation — is Javascript developer Roman Semko who believes that the technology will need a W3C-type organisation to formalise the IOTA protocol. “It will be very important for [the] biggest players to align themselves about the future of the protocol,” he states.

Semko, interviewed by IOTAHispano magazine, also outlined his own work on an IOTA P2P node discovery mechanism which incorporates load-balancing. Asked about how he proceeds with one of the major frustrations for many developers at the cutting edge of new and innovative technology, Semko emphasised the need for developers to demonstrate initiative in order to forge ahead.

IOTA arguably embodies the cryptocurrency phenomenon more than any other at this point in time — it represents a great idea in search of a solution. Whether it will become the oil of the upcoming machine economy is anyone’s guess — but to reach that stage, Semko’s insight is just: there needs to be a consensus mechanism for a comprehensive definition of the protocol, and documentation to democratise its penetration into the broader development community.

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