One of my personal crypto favourites I have mentioned already in “IOTA and the Internet of Things“, comes up with some more interesting partnerships and projects. If you haven’t read the article already, I would definately recommend to do so in order to understand one of the best and valid crypto usecases.

IOTA which is based on “The Tangle” offers free transactions and and might be the solution for the upcoming machine to machine communications around the globe. If you would like to understand how the Tangle works you should check out the visual tangle demo.

Why did IOTA jump about 27-30% today?

In order to launch the first publicly accessible data marketplace for the Internet of Things, IOTA partnered up with Microsoft, Fujitsu, Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Accenture, and PwC to name few. The marketplace itself will be powered by a distributed ledger. For now, the marketplace demo will be available until January 2018.

Meanwhile the IOTA team will keep the audience up to date by blog posts and case studies to demonstrate ways in which companies and individuals can benefit from the technology IOTA provides.

The new project, will allow its users to share and monetize data in a secured way. Once the data has been uploaded to IOTA’s decentralized ledger, it will be distributed to so called nodes to demonstrate and ensure immutability. In other words, let us assume you use a smart watch or any other device that tracks data such as your fitness level (steps, calories burned, sleep time, you name it…), which might be interesting and valuable for another party that participates. The interested party could simply buy the data from you. The idea behind the demo could also help to develope machine learning, as well as bring together the internet of things.

“We are very excited to announce the launch of our data marketplace,” Sønstebø stated. “This will act as a catalyst for a whole new paradigm of research, artificial intelligence, and democratization of data.”

“We are excited to partner with the IOTA Foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative,” Microsofts blockchain expert Omkar Naik stated.

“This next generation [sic] technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockchain that will foster innovation real world solutions, applications and pilots for our customers,” he added.

IOTAs current market capitalization is about about $3 billion. The project itself and its usecase seems to have a bright future which was also the reason why after the launch on Bitfinex in June, IOTA had a market capitalization of more than $1.5 billion in just a couple of hours.