IOTA Foundation collaborates with Imperial College London on distributed ledger innovation

The IOTA foundation announced on the 18^th of July 2017 its partnership with Imperial College’s Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering (IC3RE), as part of Outlier Venture’s research and development programme.

Imperial College will work with the IOTA Foundation to make the IOTA protocol closer to real-world adoption and to increase the utility of this new approach to distributed ledger technology.The collaboration will focus on ameliorating the IOTA protocol by building new Proof of Concepts on top of theprotocol, in areas ranging from mobility, infrastructure and the Internet of Things.

In addition, Imperial teams will focus on visualising the transactions that are operating across the IOTA Tangle, defined as the IOTA protocol’s innovative, non-linear, distributed ledger architecture. Tangle provides the benefits of decentralisation to the Internet of Things, whereby every IoT device, sensor and machine is able to exchange value in real-time, without any transaction fee. 

“The IOTA protocol is an extremely exciting new approach to distributed ledger technology that promises huge scalability and economic improvements over traditional blockchains. Imperial is home to some of the brightest young minds in cryptocurrency that will relish the opportunity to help build IOTA’s capabilities further” stated Dr. Catherine Mulligan, Co-Director for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering. 

Unlike traditional blockchains, transactions occurring across the Tangle network are not sequential and are not based on ‘blocks’, which is key to IOTA’s ability to scale dramatically using its innovative Distributed Acyclic Graph technology to handle thousands of transactions per second. This differentiates IOTA from traditional blockchains and reduces the scalability of the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.