IOTA, the digital network designed for the Internet of Things (IoT) has recently seen a massive increase in the value of their cryptocurrency, MIOTA. According to CoinMarketCap, the company has moved from 9th to 4th in largest market cap, displacing long standing 4th place holder Ripple.

In order to understand what caused this massive explosion in value, Cointelegraph caught up with Dominik Schiener and David Sønstebø, co-founders at IOTA in order to get their take on what has precipitated recent events.

Cointelegraph: The massive rise of MIOTA over the past weeks must have been encouraging. What precipitated the price explosion, in your opinion?

IOTA: IOTA has been under intensive development for over two years and has not spent any money on marketing. In this time our focus was on making this next generation distributed ledger technology a reality. In this period we refused exchanges listing IOTA in order to ensure everything was working properly before it went to market.

This explains why IOTA is now getting a lot of attention seemingly out of nowhere. People have been following the project for a long time and then they are finally able to enter. The listing in Korea at Coinone coupled with the launch of the Data Marketplace and subsequent media coverage lead to further validation that IOTA is cementing itself as a leading cryptocurrency and distributed ledger protocol.

We believe this was the threshold breaking moment for a lot of fence sitters who have been observing IOTA from a distance.

CT: What specifically is the recent partnership with Microsoft and Fujitsu all about?

IOTA: Microsoft is one of the cloud solution providers with their Azure platform. Fujitsu, Samsung ARTIK, Accenture and many others are participants in the Data Marketplace exploring the concept of trading secure and immutable data on a decentralized ledger. These are the first steps towards an open flow of data in IoT to realize the vision of Big Data.

CT: How is your platform Tangle different than traditional Blockchain?

IOTA: The short version is that IOTA goes beyond Blockchain in getting rid of fees, scaling limitations and centralization issues. It does this by making validation an intrinsic property of using the protocol. When you issue a transaction in IOTA you also validate two previous ones, which again reference their own two respective transactions and so on, building this Directed Acyclic Graph which we call a Tangle.

This means that users are also validators, which allows us to get rid of miners, which again gets rid of the fees and centralization that occurs in Blockchain architecture. Since everyone is validating two transactions for each transaction or data transmission they broadcast to the network, it means that the amount of validations i.e. transactions per second grows together with the activity on the ledger. In short: the more activity, the more validation.

CT: How do you see trust systems changing in the future?

IOTA: Trusted systems are absolutely pivotal in an age where decisions are automated and can act globally in an instant. We believe that data integrity, which you get for free in IOTA, is a main component of this. Beyond that we are working on IDentity of Things (IDoT) which will make it easier to secure components and develop reputation systems for intrusion detection and malware protection etc.