About a year ago, the crypto giant IOTA announced its exciting new partnership with Microsoft.

This announcement alone, was worth a huge amount of money to IOTA. How much money? Approximately 4X their market cap at the time of the announcement.

It took the cryptosphere by surprise and simultaneously got them insane attention as the markets went crazy just thinking about the endless possibilities.

As highlighted on Hacked.com - https://hacked.com/iota-doing-big-things-as-microsoft-partnership-announced/

“IOTA has been on a tear as of late, with prices more than doubling in the span of a week thanks to favorable headlines and a new partnership with Microsoft.”

image source - hacked.com

Not too long after, Microsoft heard about this so called "new partner" and in response said: get the [email protected]#k out… or, you know, something along those lines.

In other words, Microsoft flat out denied the partnership and their communication team said that IOTA just spread a rumor to gain more attention and in turn more money.

IOTA had no choice but to confirm that no deal was ever signed.

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/12/iota-partnership-microsoft-marketplace/

https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-clarifies-misleading-microsoft-quote-no-official-partnership

“We have never stated that there was any formal partnership with Microsoft, and instead always referred to them as a participant to the marketplace. The media has overblown the story into an “IOTA launches Data Marketplace with Microsoft”...IOTA stated.

It happens all the time in the business world, especially in sketchy start-ups. What you don’t always see, is the hidden "man behind the curtain" that made it possible. In this case, a guy named Pierre Hoffmann, a brand new IOTA employee, well not that new, he started 5 months ago according to his Linkedin.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierre-hoffmann/

If you ask IOTA though, their statement is from five days ago...interesting…

https://blog.iota.org/welcome-pierre-hoffmann-to-the-iota-foundation-41b4f89b62b0

And guess what, he previously worked for none other than Microsoft!

What a coincidence, right? Wrong! They are all parts of the same puzzle. Is this the same guy who approved the take deal to push IOTA’s price temporarily so that the founders will have a chance to dump their tokens on the news spike??

Are they paying him back by using a revolving door hiring tactic?

“We are hosting two meetups today in Chicago and on Thursday in Paris which are hosted at the Microsoft offices.”

This is a very important piece of the puzzle.

As you can see, they had some kind of meeting in 2 Microsoft offices, the latter is the more interesting, Pierre Hoffmann was Software Asset Management & Compliance - Partner ecosystem at Microsoft.

Check this tweet for example: “I will be part of this year's Frankfurt European Banking Congress, representing the #IOTA Foundation in the session "Technology in Finance: Ever Broader, Ever Deeper?" https://twitter.com/DomSchiener/status/1039102530221797376

This is from September, why did they wait with his hiring announcement?

What was really going on behind the scenes?

No one can say for sure, but I have very good reason to believe they have orchestrated this all as a marketing ploy, with marching orders sent from top to bottom.