Adrian Marks, developer, full node operator and IOTA Regional Community lead for the North of England at IOTA (MIOTA), recently expressed his pleasure over the breakthrough of the Tips and Payment application (TaPs). Having recently passed Apple’s Beta App Review process, the app has now entered a private Alpha Test phase on TestFlight.

In the words of the developer in a post about a month ago, TaPs is A simple and frictionless way to tip and pay people around you using the ease of Bluetooth to share limited information – Avatar, Avatar Name, Payment Address and the power of IOTA to provide fast, secure and feeless transactions. Working prototype developed and currently being tested.

What you Should Know about TaPs

TaPs is an iOS application run by a proof of concept algorithm, written in swift and belonging to the IOTA ecosystem. The application started off as a project. Great discoveries the world over have been made because determined people chose to stick to trying out things.

The purpose of the experiment was to provide a way into the nitty-gritty of the IOTA protocol APIs.

Its release as a full production application on the App store is a prospect in view as the app seems to formidably scale through. Marks anticipates opening it up to a wider group of alpha testers very soon the foregoing is proof of the fact that the application, although a research project, works just as fine as any other application..

Apple might consider incorporating TaPs

The fact that it still relies on IOTA which in itself is still a beta product does not bode well for the app because Apple is likely not ready to accept it on her appstore just yet. Therefore, it is no surprise that beta tests are conducted but the production release is yet in view. This app however, boasts of making frictionless tips and payments a possibility in the nearest future.

TaPs: More than we bargained for

This app could definitely do more than interpersonal transactions. It would function beyond the realms of personal device to personal device interactions, to personal device and a completely autonomous device e.g. an iPhone and a parking meter.

The app runs with the help of the Bluetooth device. In order to receive tips and payments from others, your Bluetooth device must be on even if the application is in a background mode. However, because of its capacity to consume power, it is advised that the facility be switched off when not in use so as to save battery life.

IOTA’s Efforts to Make the Emerging World a Lot Better

In a world that is fast evolving technologically and where the Internet of Things is taking center stage with companies adopting self-executing devices to run processes and machines, IOTA hopes to be the go-to platform for the machine-to-machine transactions through its verification method called the DAG.

IOTA (MIOTA) presents many possibilities for the new economy by making the Internet of Things a possibility.

The concept of internet of things is basically that of a network where device with the capability of connecting to the internet can connect to each other at any given time. This includes everything from cellphones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices and almost anything else you can think of. It is a huge network of connected “things”

Thus, IOTA works to make this a possibility through its unique network, the Tangle (a Decentralised Acyclic Graph instead of a blockchain).

In the tangle, each transaction is its own block: transactions are each linked to a few others instead of being arranged into sequential blocks. Each IOTA transaction accepted into the system must verify two prior transactions.

While it is at that, network nodes make sure that approved transactions are not at variance. This system makes it easy for IOTA to achieve much more in faster and less complex ways than blockchain.

Marks finally asserts his confidence in the success of the TaPs project in his own words, “In a future of Smart Cities filled with mobile, autonomous IOT devices, managing these social interactions between devices is going to be a key challenge…” but it is one he plans to explore.