This November saw IOTA’s market cap octupled, securing this cryptocurrency’s top 4 rank across the board and ahead of Ripple, a well-established peer token. IOT is where IOTA applies and the selling point in its pitch deck. Given the heated status quo of IOT in recent years, it’s no wonder to spot a markup on IOTA. ETC, another digital currency with good standing, also starts to deploy its presence in IOT which it deems key to achieve a breakthrough. We have conducted a comparative analysis of these two IOT forces in an effort to determine who will be the final winner in this practice.

ETC is an Ethereum-based digital currency with the system well operated for a long period. The core ETC development team consists of experienced blockchain technocrats and the way a tech solution is determined and implemented follows the principle of democracy and science. The technology that IOTA applies is akin to Raiden Network or Lightning Network, the cutting-edge technologies in nature. Bitcoin’s core development team was the first to propose using Lightning Network to address the token’s scaling debate. But that’s more in theory than in practice, which is widely accepted by the community for lacking in tests of stability.

The theory and principles of cryptography for ETC were previously adopted, proven and optimized in other IT areas. They are mature, safe, reliable and efficient information technologies. IOTA uses a balanced ternary (a numerical system represented by three-digit numbers) on a binary hardware device, which leads to an overly complex system design and a reduction in computational efficiency. Another serious problem with this design is the need to redesign the cryptographic hashing algorithm, which poses a serious safety risk. Simply put, this technology is still only stuck in the theoretical stage, too avant-garde to have the value of the practical application.

The issuance of ETC is completely decentralized, the coin price is not readily susceptible to manipulation, and a new currency policy will be implemented to systematically guarantee the total supply of ETC, making it a deflated digital currency with value of storage. IOTA, an ICO project in 2014, remains tepid. A few users controlled the majority of the tokens of IOTA, leaving the price easily manipulated and resulting in octupled price hike within less than a month. This centralized trend is detrimental to the long-term development of the community. IOTA does not require mining and transaction fees. Each participant provides the network with hashrate and the lack of incentive programs can do harm to the stability of IOTA network.

Tangle, the technology that IOTA uses, is not a real blockchain but merely to solve the problem of blockchain expansion, making blockchain a pretext of IOTA. That said, even IOTA can be applied in IOT as a technology, it is not tradable as a digital currency.

Compared with IOTA’s blind pursuit of new technologies, concepts and theories, ETC has taken every solid step to keep itself keen on mature and stable technology and constantly innovate under the premise of safety and stability. IOT is also one of the biggest use cases for ETC. The ETC development team has started the development of IOT-friendly virtual machines, making the currency universal, independent and efficient.

In addition, in order to make better use of IOT apps, the ETC community has reached a consensus and has developed a plan for cross-chain operation. Fragmentation technology and side-chain technology have been designed in response to the ever-increasing transaction data in the field of IOT and the security and efficiency have also been enhanced. The goal of the ETCDEV team is to make ETC blockchain a stable and easy-to-use technology. They’d rather slow down the development progress than do rash experiments. This would avoid users’ future loss caused by irreversible errors.

In conclusion, ETC is more like a stable and easy-to-use technology while IOTA is closer to a hasty experiment. The importance of the wide use of technology is not the blind pursuit of new concepts or technologies but stability and user-friendliness. Therefore, ETC has the incomparable universality that IOTA lacks and provides stronger support to IOT apps.