NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- IOTA, a revolutionary new transactional settlement and data transfer layer for the Internet of Things, today announced the launch of the IOTA Ecosystem Fund. Valued above $2 million, the fund is entirely dedicated towards fostering growth of IOTA through incentivizing participation in expanding and shaping the ecosystem through use cases, libraries and tools, as well as hackathons.

The IOTA Ecosystem Fund is for developers who want to contribute and be part of the next generation of IOTA's unique distributed ledger technology. From projects like adding some sensors to a Raspberry Pi and making it useful through IOTA through to something more complex, the IOTA Ecosystem Fund exists to make it a reality and provide these opportunities.

The engineering philosophy behind IOTA is one of modularity and pragmatism. Rather than attempting to create an 'all in one' universal solution, IOTA intends to instead keep the underlying ledger protocol as basic and efficient as possible and to extend its utility through the IOTA eXtension Interface(IXI). New IXI modules take a lot of time to develop due to the vast amount of time that goes into research, so people more inclined towards researching topics and writing whitepapers than coding can also apply for funding through the IOTA Ecosystem Fund.

IOTA also wants to make the overall development of IOTA easier and widen its utility through libraries, and so encourages any idea for libraries which could be useful for the community to apply for development funding. In a similar vein, IOTA Learn is curating tutorials on how to get started using and implementing IOTA into projects. In order to ensure a certain quality and maintenance of tutorials, significant sums from the IOTA Ecosystem Fund will be allocated towards this section. People who have done a proof of concept or similar on IOTA and wish to share the step by step process on how they did it can earn money whist doing this.

"Every great open source project has a great ecosystem surrounding it, in many ways it is the defining characteristic that separates a mediocre project from a great one. A thriving ecosystem is a prerequisite for long term success," said David Sonstebo, Founder at IOTA. "The IOTA Ecosystem Fund is backed by over $2 million to open up a world of possibilities for developers and researchers to take the IOTA ecosystem even further."

Applicants applying for funding in any of these categories are required to fill out a form with some basic questions, including the total desired budget for the project, its scope, description and timeline. Community representatives will then respond, ask more questions and define the deliverables of the project. After the terms has been agreed upon the IOTA Foundation will greenlight the project and grant the first payment for the project to officially start.

ABOUT IOTA:

IOTA is an open source non-profit effort that enables companies to explore new business-to-business models by making every technological resource a potential service to be traded on an open market in real time, with no fees. IOTA goes beyond blockchain to resolve the main pain points of blockchain by completely reinventing the underlying architecture. IOTA's Tangle ledger is able to settle transactions with zero fees so devices can trade exact amounts of resources on-demand, as well as store data from sensors and dataloggers securely and verified on the ledger.

Beyond the Internet of Things, IOTA plays a pivotal role in enabling real-time services and economies in other arenas, due to the fact that IOTA has no fees or fundamental scaling limit. IOTA, for the first time in fintech history, enables services where compensation happens for exact quantities, rather than in intervals or pay upfront/after the fact.

Media Contact: North 6th Agency, Inc. (For IOTA)

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SOURCE IOTA