IOTA-DCI Fight Opens a New Pandora’s Box

The ongoing IOTA-DCI conflict has just taken a bloody turn. In case you haven’t been following, cryptocurrency IOTA is embroiled in a controversy with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research group, which has raised giant question marks on IOTA’s future. But just as we were beginning to second-guess our IOTA price forecast for 2018, the latest revelations have restored our faith in IOTA.

We have reasons to believe that IOTA may survive this temporary hiccup and live to fight another day. Let’s give you a quick heads-up on what’s been going on lately.

A think tank at MIT called Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) peer-reviewed IOTA’s technology and identified purported vulnerabilities in it.

The IOTA team retorted that the vulnerabilities did not pose an actual threat to users. And yet, albeit reluctantly, IOTA made some tweaks in its technology as per DCI’s request.




Mind you, this happened back in August 2017. There wasn’t much noise about it until now. So what exactly went wrong?

The emails that were exchanged between the two parties back then were leaked a week ago on an IOTA-focused blog. This is where things went downhill. Frankly speaking, the emails make both sides look equally bad.

Following the leak, academicians who are on DCI’s side are bashing IOTA on social media, calling on investors to pull out of IOTA. Meanwhile, IOTA’s team is retorting in defense.

According to IOTA, DCI has massive conflicts of interest and the leaks conveniently meet its nefarious intentions to malign IOTA’s reputation.

Amid this ongoing IOTA vs DCI controversy, a new Pandora’s box has opened this week. An anonymous post on Pastebin has divulged in great detail how DCI, its researchers, and crypto media personalities may be involved in pulling down IOTA and propagating its rival cryptocurrency ZCash. (Source: “After the DCI/IOTA email leaks…,” Pastebin, March 4, 2018.)

Regardless of the politics on this issue, let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture here, which is that IOTA presents a cutting-edge use-case with data monetization.

Recall that IOTA’s platform is built on the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology, which is different than the blockchain technology that Bitcoin and most other cryptos are built on.

IOTA calls its DAG technology “Tangle,” which is blockless, free, and infinitely scalable. This is why this technology is raising eyebrows everywhere.

Rivals fear that IOTA may eventually overtake blockchain in adoption since businesses and governments would find it more viable to use a free platform that processes transactions almost instantaneously than the slower, more expensive blockchain-based platforms.

IOTA’s recent partnership with Taiwan’s Taipei City is one example where the city officials have chosen IOTA over a number of other available options, possibly for the reasons listed above.

Taipei City is in the process of converting itself into a smart city where the identities of its population will be digitized on a decentralized platform. To that end, the city has chosen to test IOTA’s technology.

Similarly, back in December, Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH—the venture capital fund of German industrial behemoth Bosch—bought a stake in IOTA, possibly because they saw value in it.

My point is that the ongoing IOTA-DCI controversy should do little harm to IOTA in the long run. As obvious from its price chart, the IOTA price has continued to move in tandem with the market, largely trading free of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) being spread against it on social media.

Chart courtesy of TradingView.com

Analyst Take

It’s true that IOTA is still in the beta phase and will take its time to secure mainstream adoption. But since its technology offers a very solid use-case in data monetization, we foresee it getting there despite this short-lived trainwreck. The IOTA-DCI controversy may not matter a few months down the road. Therefore, we remain bullish in our IOTA price forecast for 2018.