Image of Kenya (credit aWhere)

It has now been nearly a year since the official announcement of IOTA. After months of beta testing, the first stage of the live network launch finally happened in July this year. The team, community and the technology has evolved greatly over the last year, all in preparation of establishing IOTA one of the biggest and most important projects in the distributed ledger/blockchain and Internet-of-Things space.

As with every new revolutionary technology, the first stage is all about development mostly behind closed doors, to ensure that the technology works as intended. With over 6 months of public beta testing, more than 2 million transactions and roughly $60m transacted via the IOTA Tangle, we can confidently say that this first stage was completed successfully.

Now it is time to tell the world about who we are, what we’re working on, and make it clear to everyone that IOTA is one of the most revolutionary projects of the century. This has been going on largely behind the scenes since inception, but this summer we have started promoting the platform publicly at conferences and meetups. This blog post is a brief summary of some of the IOTA Foundation’s efforts thus far, as well as a glimpse into what is yet to come.

IOTA at Hackathons

Obviously one of our major focuses is to help developers understand and utilize IOTA in their projects. It is one of our priorities to make IOTA a developer-friendly environment which makes it easy to plug it into any type of application. The best way to start this process is obviously through Hackathons, where developers get hands on experience utilizing the protocol and can provide real-time feedback.

In July this year we sponsored a hackathon called Hack4Farming in Nairobi, Kenya together with aWhere and the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. The 2-day event was attended by some ~80 developers from Kenya who were eager to solve hard problems in agriculture through Big Data, IoT and IOTA. The winning teams not only received monetary rewards, but will receive further advise to help them turn their Hackathon projects into more fleshed out applications.

We are very excited about Kenya and see a lot of potential in further streamlining our efforts there. Soon we will provide a detailed overview of the Foundation’s effort in Kenya and Africa in general. We are already in the preliminary stages of planning more hackathons together with some of our corporate partners in Europe and Asia.