Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA – a cryptocurrency project designed for the Internet of Things (IoT) and built on DAG (directed acyclic graph) technology – was recently interviewed by the cryptocurrency news publication, BeInCrypto at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit.
Per the interview, Schiener was asked what he thought about the overall crypto industry, where it’s heading, about the cryptos currently ranked among the top 10, and which do not belong.
In response, Schiener was quick to call out Tron (TRX), a crypto project ranked #10 at the time of the interview:
“Tron (TRX). It’s a copycat and I don’t see any concrete business value that they add apart from pumping the price.”
Schiener said that in 2017 the industry completely lost focus on why we’re creating distributed ledgers in the first place. He stated that many ICOs and projects like Tron were all about the money raised, rather than solving important problems and delivering value.
“We Are Focused on Delivering Value”
Unlike Tron and its CEO Justin Sun, IOTA as an entity is focused on developing a core protocol and an ecosystem on top of it, rather than pumping their token’s price.
Providing a simple explanation of IOTA’s value proposition, Schiener said:
“The value proposition of IOTA is a very simple and concrete one. You purchase the token and it is utilized within the ecosystem, giving you a stake in the future of this machine economy… We are more focused on the value and utilization proposition of the token itself.”
Adding to IOTA’s value proposition, Schiener explained that the IOTA project has matured a lot. It currently has a team of over 100 people in 23 countries, and one of the biggest ecosystems in the space.
Explaining the importance of this ecosystem, Schiener said:
“Companies want to utilize a token, they want to participate in the machine economy, and so for an investor, it is now easier to see the size of the ecosystem we have built, and the opportunities available. That is where investors should examine to make any investment decisions.”
IOTA’s Focus and Developments Moving Forward
During the interview, Schiener was asked questions about IOTA’s future developments, primary areas of focus, and if there’s anything to look forward to this year.
In response, the IOTA co-founder proclaimed that this entire year is exciting for IOTA because they are really focused on making IOTA the first enterprise-ready permission-less ledger.
As well, they are putting a lot of effort into removing “the Coordinator,” which is used to guide the network to help figure out which transactions are valid, and which are not. IOTA has been very much criticized for this centralized aspect, but as Schiener puts it:
“The validation and consensus are still decentralized, as the Coordinator doesn’t do any consensus, but instead, guides the network in the validation process.”
Schiener said that IOTA started off as a proof of concept and needed this coordinator, just as Bitcoin (BTC) did in its early days with mining until 2012.
Whether IOTA will remove the Coordinator in 2019 is yet to be known, but Schiener says this is a big task for the year, and they are already receiving some promising results. As for other aspects of the project, IOTA is focused on having products run by companies on the live network in 2019.
Do you see more value in the IOTA project than Tron? Will IOTA surpass Tron in the ranks on CoinMarketCap this year? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
