In what's sure to be a major talking point in the blockchain community, it was recently announced that Johann Jungwirth, the Chief Digital Officer of Volkswagen, will be joining the supervisory board of the IOTA Foundation. Hailing from Germany, the IOTA Foundation is a non-profit organisation that acts as the parent company of the IOTA ecosystem, and which is set up to fund and coordinate the development of that system. It is significant for being the first government-approved non-profit in the country built on the same blockchain technology made famous by cryptocurrency giants Bitcoin and Ethereum . The appointment of Mr Jungwirth to the company’s board will doubtless be met with great interest, as the IOTA Foundation looks to take its technology beyond the boundaries already set by existing developments in blockchain. Aside from his role as CDO of Volkswagen, in which he spearheaded the digital transformation of the entire VW Group, Mr Jungwirth has also worked as President of Research at Mercedes-Benz, and Director of MAC Systems Engineering for the European wing of Apple. With such in-depth experience at the sharp end of technology-driven markets, Mr Jungwirth’s presence on the IOTA board is likely to inspire the organisation to work even harder to bring its burgeoning new technology to market.The IOTA Foundation claims its distributed ledger technology goes beyond the blockchain. Whereas existing blockchain protocols are limited to the noting of transactions made using specific cryptocurrencies, creating a traceable and impervious electronic trail for the security of its users, IOTA states that its next-generation iteration of the technology will allow machines to securely transact both money and data simultaneously with one another, while also recording the fact of the transaction without third party involvement, as is required at the moment. The technology, while still in development, has already been utilised, performing payment transactions worth several billion dollars. While many altcoins have seen their value drop in recent weeks, following the late-2017 spike, the underlying tech is still proving valuable, albeit in a different form from when it was originally created.