The Chairman and CEO of the Object Managament Group (OMG), Richard Soley, stated yesterday that there will be an official open standard for IOTA, the innovative cryptocurrency project, by the end of next year.

The Object Management Group is a computer industry standards consortium which develops enterprise integration standards for technologies such as USBs. Richard Soley, the CEO of this consortium, made this statement when talking to the IOTA Foundation yesterday in the first edition of a quarterly update livestream titled “IOTA Insights”.

He also assured that shortly after OMG gives standards for IOTA’s innovative technology, it will be succeeded by official standardisation by the ISO shortly thereafter.

The ISO is the International Organisation for Standardisation, an internationally-accepted body which sets international standards. It is composed of representatives from standards organisations across the world, and receiving ISO certification will be a huge milestone for IOTA.

According to Soley, when new technologies are standardised internationally, and become open-sourced, they are more widely adopted. Wider recognition and adoption make IOTA’s currency MIOTA a valuable asset, and members of the IOTA community believe that at the moment it is severely undervalued. IOTA is currently #18 in terms of all cryptocurrencies in total market capitalisation, with one MIOTA being worth $0.28.

Technological standardisation is good for IOTA, which has developed its own cryptocurrency based on a completely different platform than other cryptocurrencies, which are based on blockchain technology. IOTA has innovated ‘the Tangle’, a distributed ledger technology that has just recently announced plans to become decentralised, but which boasts impressive levels of scalability.

What is the Tangle?

Rather than using blockchain technology like all major cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and Ethereum do, IOTA is a cryptocurrency which runs on its system: the Tangle. It differs from blockchain technology in a few key ways. In a broad sense, the Tangle does not have miners who use computing power in order to mine more cryptocurrencies and keep the ledger running. Instead, every user is a miner. When they perform transactions, say, through their phones, the phone will automatically perform the proof-of-work calculation to validate two previous transactions. This ability is not restricted to mobile phones, and virtually any “smart” machine could join the Tangle network, achieving the machine economy that IOTA is trying to cultivate. If it works, a user can buy a drink from a vending machine connected to the IOTA network using its cryptocurrency, the MIOTA. In a more futuristic sense, machines can interact with each other, with houses paying their own bills and cars paying for their own parking.