“A permissionless distributed ledger for a new economy.” This is how IOTA defines its blockchain. The first open-source distributed ledger that is being built to power the future of the Internet of Things with feeless microtransactions and data integrity for machines. IOTA’s blockchain does not consist of transactions grouped into blocks and stored in sequential chains, as with bitcoin, but as a stream of individual transactions entangled together.
Blockchain technology promised a compelling vision: decentralized networks allowing open innovation and peer-to-peer transactions without intermediaries or fees. Ultimately, they were never built to execute it in full, due to inherent technical flaws in their design. As blockchain adoption has increased over the last decade, early adopters have been hit with sluggish transaction times and skyrocketing fees. As rewards for validating blockchain transactions became increasingly competitive, their networks have also become increasingly centralized around a few powerful players. But the need for decentralized and permissionless systems remains, and has only increased in recent years.
By solving the inefficiencies of the blockchain, IOTA, based on the revolutionary distributed ledger technology, the Tangle, is the missing link for the Internet of Things and Web 3.0. Powering a secure, scalable and feeless transaction settlement layer, IOTA will empower machines and humans to participate in flourishing new permissionless economies.
In the second quarter of 2018, IOTA launched the Qubic protocol on its blockchain. Which is not a new coin or token! Qubic is a protocol that specifies IOTA’s solution for quorum-based computations, including such constructs as Oracle machines, outsourced computations, and smart contracts. It provides general-purpose, cloud- or fog-based, permissionless, multiprocessing capabilities on the Tangle. In the long term, Qubic will allow people to leverage world-wide unused computing capacity for a myriad of computational needs, all while helping to secure the IOTA Tangle: an IOTA-based world supercomputer.
The original Qubic idea had some hard to overcome problems. The IOTA protocol was, in fact, created to help solve those problems. Indeed, IOTA was designed to become the global standard for Internet of Things messaging and payments.
