Dozens of strategic partnerships and developments with European governments. We talk about a crypto project that is very different from its competitors
IOTA stands apart from many cryptocurrency projects for several reasons. IOTA is not a blockchain, to achieve the tasks of transaction accounting, the project uses DAG technology (directed acyclic graph), which, in addition to the cryptocurrency sector, is also used in statistics, machine learning and developments related to artificial intelligence.
There are no fees on the IOTA network – sending a coin is absolutely free, which makes the technology attractive for use in the IoT (Internet of Things) field, where many devices will have to send thousands of microtransactions at the same time.
IOTA also differed from many projects in that it did not resort to the classic marketing strategies for the sector that attract users with various bounty campaigns or the promotion of high-profile news. Infrequently, IOTA is also mentioned on traders’ channels.
However, looking at the coin’s list of partnerships, it can be said that this technology is one of the favorites in Europe – there are dozens of strategic and scientific partnerships behind the coin, which do not always appear in the crypto news at all and often do not affect the price. We talk about several European developments with IOTA in different areas.
- Encouraging good habits in Dutch cities
The EnergieKnip app rewards the citizens of Emmen, a municipality of about 100,000 citizens in the northeast of Holland, with digital points developed by IOTA to anonymously share data on energy saving activities. In the future, points can be spent on the purchase of energy-saving devices in local stores participating in the promotion.
At the macro level, the project is part of a broader Dutch government policy to reduce energy costs in order to achieve the UN’s global climate goals.
The goals of the token are to educate citizens about energy issues, encourage them to install “green” devices in their homes to reduce the overall energy consumption in the country, increase demand for energy-saving devices, and collect anonymous information about energy use in the city.
The promotion was launched on January 10, 2022 by sending letters to 25,000 homes in Emmen with instructions on how to earn points. The popularity of the initiative is evidenced by the fact that at the moment all the points provided for distribution have already been exhausted and are in the wallets of users.
- Patient data protection and e-health
The IOTA Foundation received a €535,000 grant to participate in the European Commission’s SECANT (Security and Privacy Protection in Internet of Things Devices) project. The initiative plans to develop a modern and secure registry infrastructure and platform for eHealth threat analysis and mitigation.
With a total budget of over five million euros, SECANT officially launched in September 2021 and aims to achieve concrete results from its developments by August 2024.
With the increase in the use of digital records in medicine, the question of data security has become acute – unlike paper records, digital records are vulnerable to hacking, misuse and technical errors.
The topic received additional attention during the Covid19 pandemic, after the controversy over the various case tracking systems implemented by governments to varying degrees around the world.
The vulnerability of health-related data is not only a privacy issue, but also causes serious financial damage. Only the approximate cost of data breaches in the healthcare industry worldwide in 2020 is estimated at $7.13 million.
- Demonstration of the storage and reuse of De Volksbank user identities
Registering for new services and websites is a repetitive and annoying process for users. If the new service is financial, for example, in a bank, insurance company or cryptocurrency exchange, then the registration and verification process takes even longer.
To comply with required KYC (know your customer) and anti-money laundering regulations, financial services must request and store digital copies of many sensitive personal documents. At the moment, this process is repeated every time anew in each bank, insurance company or exchange, the services of which the user is going to use.
While demonstrating the technology’s potential to customers, De Volksbank generated a new identity. The test identity is stored as verifiable credentials in the Selv app on IOTA.
The demo consisted of a simulated environment where the user can use their reusable credentials to open a new legal entity, create a corporate bank account, and take out liability insurance.
With the Selv app, all three of the above can be done with a few button presses. This demonstrates that the long and tedious process of identifying, storing and verifying data can be greatly streamlined.
Users also gain control over additional data assigned to their identity that they use in the process. So, for example, the proof of liability insurance can be used for other interactions with various parties in the future from the same application.
- Lots of new partnerships on the way?
The IOTA Foundation has been selected as one of five contractors for the second round of pre-commercial procurement to develop and test technology prototypes for the future European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). A list of all contractors trying and trying to win the tender and details can be found on the European Commission website .
At the moment, in addition to IOTA, it includes other projects developing solutions in the field of the Internet of things, technologies that combine blockchain architecture with the usual relational database architecture, and projects working on integrating blockchain into existing infrastructure.
The solutions sought by the commission should include the identification and classification of objects, the ability to trace them, the management and use of data about them, the automation of tasks using smart contracts.
The exchange with external solutions in the field of artificial intelligence through appropriate interfaces, as well as the provision of the possibility of using reward and incentive models users using tokenized approaches. The proposed solutions are expected to have high throughput and scalability and, of course,
