Foundation efforts

We spent a significant amount of 2017 establishing the IOTA Foundation as a gemeinnützige stiftung / non Profit foundation in Germany. While being the world’s first approved non-Profit in Germany focused on distributed ledger technology was a huge milestone in itself, it’s really in 2018 that the Foundation will be properly established and its impact as a German non-Profit will be made very apparent from a practical point of view.

In the face of all the progression that has occurred in the project so far it is easy to forget just how young IOTA really is. It is still very early days in the broader perspective, IOTA has seen an explosive growth in the last few months, to the point where the demand for IOTA almost outweighs the available human resources and capacity. The Foundation is being inundated daily with requests from corporations, non-profits, academia, and start-ups who are either exploring distributed ledgers for the first time or shifting from Blockchain to Tangle. The latter is happening more and more after Blockchain’s limitations have been demonstrated thoroughly through 2017. The main bottleneck of IOTA’s growth internally now is lack of human resources. Establishing proper structure and streamlined processes, as well as onboarding tens of new developers and other vital human resources, will be the number one priority at the beginning of 2018 to meet this demand and thus continue IOTA’s adoption and goal of establishing it as the de facto DLT for the Industry 4.0 era.

Development

In 2017 we have been conducting a lot of research on optimization of IOTA. 2018 is the year where these developments will be implemented, with the goal of reaching a production ready state by the end of 2018 and begin the international standardization process together with the industry. We will also be hosting several virtual and physical hackathons throughout the year to drive the development around the IOTA protocol.