The news from IOTA is once again very mixed. On the one hand, the Foundation seems to be fermenting. A former employee unpacks and reports what is going wrong at the foundation. At the same time, the foundation succeeds in becoming a finalist in the federal government's Corona Hackathon and a member of an EU project.
Oh IOTA. There is hardly a cryptocurrency that makes it so difficult to report neutral about it. Because you always have a polarity, like in a bipolar person, only that depression and mania happen at the same time in IOTA. On the one hand there are exciting industry partnerships and visionary projects, on the other hand there are childish scandals, embarrassing bugs and deadlines that have not been met. This is not much different this week.
He is not angry, but still wants to get rid of a lot
The developer Philipp Blum formerly worked at the IOTA Foundation as a "consulting developer for the ecosystem"; his job was to raise a developer community for the Internet of Things.
He recently left the Berlin-based foundation and explains his reasons in a public farewell letter. We have seen such farewell letters many times in the crypto scene. They are sometimes a “rage-quit” like Mike Hearn's legendary farewell; but even if they use a less drastic language, the authors like to express in them all the anger that has accumulated over time.
So Philipp emphasizes that he has no resentment. “I'm not angry and I don't want to harm the IOTA Foundation. They have some really good engineers and employees. ”He doesn't like to write this letter, but says that“ the IOTA community needs this information. ”And then he gets started. He lists everything that bothers him about the IOTA Foundation.
On the one hand, that would be the lack of transparency. For example, the EDF Fund Tracker, which should show how the Foundation uses donations and funds. It was last updated in mid-2019, and looking at the credit address shows a gap of nearly a million dollars. It doesn't look any better with the IOTA that David Otherwisebo and CfB chopped off during the IOTA ICO. They should have belonged to Jinn, the organization that made the first ICO, and should have passed to the Foundation accordingly. What David is doing with the credits that shouldn't really belong to him is completely unknown.
Financially, things are not looking good for the Foundation, which the Community is happy to keep in the dark about. Philipp estimates that she burned all her money in 13 months. It therefore only has one year left to manage sustainably and to complete Coordicide, the shutdown of the central coordinator. Which brings us to the next problem.
Because the Foundation technically delivers far too little. It was supposed to create a protocol for the machine economy of the Internet of Things. But actually she hardly works on this topic. She has “no idea how to integrate the IOTA protocol into important IoT protocols. She doesn't even work on it. ”At the same time, she's getting bogged down in countless software projects - Hornet, Bee, goshimmer, IRI, cIRI, the marketplace, stream, smart contracts, the Permanode. "It's just too much. You can't manage all of this with a handful of engineers. ”As usual, things get slower when you get bogged down. Coordicide, the shutdown of the coordinator, is long overdue, but still far from being in sight. The Foundation presented the Coordicide Roadmap almost a year ago, and it gave the impression that it could be done in a few months. Today it seems far away from that.
The moonpay hack shows the consequences of relying on quantity instead of quality. The XSS attack was more or less a rookie bug, and even if the bug was mostly with Moonpay, it says something that only IOTA was affected.
So what Philipp Blum is spreading is a whole lot of wood. Of course, some things could be due to the anger of a former employee whose suggestions and concerns were not taken as seriously as he would have liked. But parts of the criticism are also worrying: the Foundation's thin financial ceiling, the neglect of the connection to IoT protocols and the fact that it is too many projects.
At the same time, however, the Foundation is still able to provide good news.
Hackathon and Horizon 2020
In this way, the Foundation managed to be selected in the final of the #SmartDevelopmentHack. This is a project of the Ministry of Economy together with an EU organization for development aid. The aim is to use smart technology to find ways to alleviate the consequences of the corona crisis. Around 1,000 teams submitted projects, 20 of which were selected to participate in the hackathon on May 14 and 15. Who finally won is not yet known.
The IOTA Foundation was also able to qualify. But you shouldn't overstate the news either. IOTA does not participate in its own project, but is only part of a project. The name is "Smart Care Corona Response in Eastern European countries and African countries", in German for example: "Intelligent responses to care for Corona in Eastern European and African countries." In addition to the IOTA Foundatoin, five other partners are also involved Health and education are to be assigned. What it is specifically about is not publicly known. But the IOTA Foundation seems to have succeeded in convincing the other partners to need a blockchain or a tangle.
The IOTA Foundation has also managed to become part of the Dig_it project. This is a funding project from the EU's Horizon 2020 program, which awards money to science and technology projects across the EU. The Foundation has already managed to benefit from Horizon 2020 funding as part of the + CityXchange project. Dig_it is now aiming to extract mining industry data and unite it on an Internet of Things platform to gain new insights that improve worker health and safety and make the industry greener. The IOTA Foundation is one of 16 partners across Europe. The consortium will receive 7 million euros over the next 48 months, of which the IOTA Foundation will receive 155,000. This could be a great way to position the Tangle for the Internet of Things.
Despite the obvious problems, the Foundation continues to succeed in winning partners, starting successful projects and receiving grants. At the same time, however, this seems to deepen the fragmentation of the Foundation, which is why there is a lack of resources to complete the actual, long overdue projects.