IOTA is running out of cash

Since 2019, IOTA has become less whimsical in its marketing. Still, the shift to more practical milestones and objectives doesn't solve the project's overarching issues.

The use case for IOTA (what sounds similar to Toyota and everyone knows the ad slogan) started in a time where people started to dream about a new society, DAO, and the all-over networking world connected by computer super power. IOTA followed the roadmap to catch up with the hot topic connectivity. Everyone's data should be accessible at the same time when they have created. Independently from location, circumstances, and other barriers. Everyone has access to knowledge about people and what happens around him just the second he needs this information.

IOTA promised to have the technology answer for the problems of IoT and started to create partnerships. This was followed up by a huge marketing campainge as Ripple has done. IOTA system called tangle is much more a modified noncryptography copy of an existing system called BitTorrent, where the swarm theory and pick up system is a little bit different but still the handwriting blue pause for IOTA.

In a lot of discussions and meetups, I tried to explain why this system won't work from a technological point of view. But IOTA was in the hype and after all Telecom Companies provide IoT on a level IOATA never had caught up. Since then, there has been no deadline for its implementation. The negative feedback on the development process from a former member of IOTA’s former Developer Advocate of the Ecosystem team, Philipp Blum, elevates concerns. 

Overall, the fact that the team prioritized conventional development practices over innovating, for the time being, is somewhat promising. 

Given that the project spent years on research, issues with changing internal politics shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s more important that the team is beginning to deliver working solutions.

IOTA Foundation Running Out of Money

The spike in the team’s activity is dictated by the depleting financial resources of the IOTA Foundation. For now, the Foundation has slightly over 59.6 Trillion MIOTA (Ti) tokens valued at $23.8 million at current prices.

Over the past year, the project’s average monthly burn rate was 4.6 Ti. At such a rate, IOTA Foundation has until August 2021 before it runs out of its crypto holdings. 

The major roadblocks for IOTA’s evolution include centralization, lack of commercial use cases, and a small ecosystem. Moreover, the team may soon run out of money, and one of the co-founders is bent on emptying what little is left of the coffers.

The past is the future we said. If 2015 is the future for 2021 there is a train that never has picked up people only wasting money and energy in effortless tires to make tangle a leading technology. But the limits have been seen back in these days. IOTA missed the innovation.