Editor’s Note: Before one can ask for something, they must first be able to ask about it. And before one can ask about something, they must first be aware of it. This short post on the emerging distributed technology enabled by the Tangle data structure is provided with the goal of creating initial awareness for data and legal discovery professionals of a potential new approach to solving current inefficiencies in Blockchain.
Extract from IOTA.org*
With the advent of distributed ledger technologies, we are now able to distribute and synchronize ledgers of data and money in secure, distributed, decentralized and permissionless environments. By removing the need for trusted third-parties as the gatekeepers and arbiters of truth, enormous efficiency gains, innovation opportunities and new value propositions emerge.
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 financial rewards for validating blockchain transactions became increasingly competitive, their networks have also become increasingly centralized around a few powerful actors. 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 Everything 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 – the most important one being the Machine Economy which we are building.
IOTA’s distributed ledger, by contrast, does not consist of transactions grouped into blocks and stored in sequential chains, but as a stream of individual transactions entangled together.
Read the complete article at What is IOTA?
* IOTA is a revolutionary new transaction settlement and data transfer layer for the Internet of Things (IoT)
** The Tangle is the data structure behind IOTA and is a particular kind of directed graph which holds transactions.
Additional Reading
- Dweb: Building Cooperation and Trust into the Web with IPFS
- Foundational, Not Disruptive: The Truth About Blockchain
White Paper on The Tangle (Serguei Popov)
The Tangle – IOTASource: ComplexDiscovery
