We’ve been working very hard the last few months to organize ourselves and our teams, and today I’d like to share a little bit of insight into how this all translates into our Research & Engineering plans for the coming months.

First things first— this post is meant only to give some insight into what is going on behind the scenes. It doesn’t go into much detail, but that will be happening soon on our main website, iota.org. (nb. I really liked the Trinity-style roadmap, developed by one of our amazing community contributors, and he is currently revamping it for use on the main site.)

R&D Targets

We understand that it’s not always clear exactly what we’re working on, and we hope to help change that by giving some more insight into the way we think about things. We also understand that, because of this lack of clarity, it’s not always clear just how much work the IOTA Foundation R&D team puts in. We have set some targets (maybe a better word would be “workstreams”), and all of the efforts we put forward in R&D aim to advance at least one of these.

Network : Strengthening and improving the IOTA infrastructure

: Strengthening and improving the IOTA infrastructure Decentralization : The raison d’être for a distributed ledger

: The raison d’être for a distributed ledger Dapps : Recognizing the need for developer inclusion

: Recognizing the need for developer inclusion Cryptography : Formalizing our techniques and understanding

: Formalizing our techniques and understanding Adoption: Encouraging widespread usage of IOTA

It isn’t always clear exactly which project fits in exactly which target, and probably for many projects a case could be made for more than one. What’s important, though, is that there is a clear connection between what we do, and where we want to go.

What’s more, we have not set specific deadlines or ETAs for our R&D targets, as we feel these will be more of a hindrance to the freely flowing creative processes required to reach these goals. Remember, IOTA is not a new implementation of an old problem, but rather a totally new problem altogether! Because this can certainly be frustrating for people who just want to know: “When [x]!”, we will work hard over the next months to communicate more transparently about where our projects are in their development, so that you can see for yourself the progress and worry less about the timeframe.

We will be putting up more details as we can, but for now I hope this list will at least satisfy your curiosity (and maybe even contains a few surprises). Personally, I am amazed by the work our team puts in, and enormously thankful to be able to work with such incredible people. Check the list, and please, give them a hand!