Taipei News Likely to Push IOTA Up the Crypto Rankings List

Internet of things (IoT). Machine economy. Distributed ledger. Industry 4.0. Tangle technology. Those are all the buzzwords that underpin IOTA cryptocurrency. We’ve long been bullish on this crypto for reasons discussed in our IOTA coin forecast. This time, however, it’s the latest IOTA-Taipei City partnership that has us excited.

In case you haven’t heard, the IOTA foundation, the non-profit organization behind IOTA, has recently joined hands with Taiwan’s capital city, Taipei, for a groundbreaking project.

Taipei is in the process of turning itself into a smart city, which means that data of all forms is being digitized. That includes the identities of its population. Taipei is currently testing IOTA’s Tangle technology to create an online database of citizen identities that’s decentralized on a distributed ledger and can’t be infiltrated. (Source: “City of Taipei Confirms It’s Testing IOTA Tech for ID,” CoinDesk, February 8, 2018.)

The one obvious reason to pick IOTA may have been the lack of fees on its platform. IOTA completely bypasses the technical complications associated with identifying validators on a blockchain and rewarding miners with fees.




For reference, IOTA is a new revolutionary technology that improves upon Bitcoin’s blockchain technology to give us a blockless platform that’s free, secure, and easy to use. Since it is blockless, it doesn’t require mining to keep its network up and running.

The concept of decentralized digital identifications is one of the most eminent use cases for the cryptocurrency. IOTA has previously partnered with REFUNITE, a non-profit organization that keeps a database for refugees and internally displaced persons to identify missing persons and reconnect them with their families. REFUNITE used IOTA’s platform to create a decentralized database of digital identities for refugees.

What Makes IOTA Different Than Other Cryptocurrencies?

Data monetization is IOTA’s cash cow. IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø calls data the “new oil” of our age. This is because the next generation of technology will see machines communicating with machines without the intervention of humans.

The whole concept of IOTA is to make it secure for machines to exchange data or anything of monetary value, in the IoT ecosystem. IOTA calls this the “machine economy,” where machines will not only be communicating, but transacting with each other. IOTA’s decentralized platform will ensure that malicious intruders or malware cannot get into this machine-based ecosystem.

To give you an idea how this may work in the most simplistic way, consider that your self-driving car may be able to pay another self-driving car for making way for it at peak hour when you’re running late for an important business meeting.

The idea is futuristic, but not unfathomable. Many who first heard of IOTA were instantly sold on this idea. So were we. IOTA’s price performance against bellwether crypto Bitcoin is a good testament of it.

Chart courtesy of TradingView.com

The IOTA token price reached an all-time high through the December bull market when IOTA took the fifth spot on the list of most valuable cryptocurrencies. Since then, the crypto was bumped down the ranks as the crypto markets crashed. Yet, IOTA is up more than 140% in the past three months.

Analyst Take

Despite the recent price drop, mostly owed to the crypto market crash, we remain steadfast in our IOTA coin forecast. The IOTA-Taipei partnership bolsters our belief that the crypto may be heading past the $5.00 mark sooner rather than later.