On the Crypto Coin Show, Dominic Scheiner, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Iota Foundation, discussed the initiatives and recent updates the team has been working on. Since Iota’s launch in 2015, the team has focused on proving the real-world adoption of blockchain and building a better ledger architecture with the tangle. Their recent focus has been on introducing tokenization and smart contracts to leverage the dag’s full potential. To validate every protocol upgrade, the team launched Shimmer Network, a dedicated network to test and validate new features before upgrading to Iota. The network is focused on validating the Stardust upgrade, which includes tokenization and an execution layer for smart contracts. While Iota’s ecosystem has primarily worked with industry partners, Shimmer Network will enable Iota to grow in the DeFi space and empower the community to build on top of their technology.
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The Crypto Coin Show: Interview with Dominic Scheiner, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Iota Foundation
Introduction
Hi, I’m Ashton Addison from Blockwest Capital for Investment Pitch Media, and today on The Crypto Coin Show, we have Dominic Scheiner, co-founder and chairman of the Iota Foundation. Dominic, welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time.
Overview of the Iota Foundation
A lot is going on with your team working on Iota. I’m excited to dive into a little bit on the protocol and some of the recent updates that your team’s working on. For those who aren’t familiar with the intricacies of Iota and the Iota Foundation, I would love to start by just getting a high level on sort of the initiatives that your team has built up so far, and then we’ll dive into the latest details.
“Yeah, yeah, of course. So, I would personally classify Iota as one of the OG projects, right? We’ve been around since 2015, and we launched a project back in 2015 with a focus on two areas. First of all, we wanted to prove real-world adoption of blockchain by working with big industry players, governments, and so on to really show how crypto can be applied in supply chain and mobility. And the second thesis that we had with Iota was that we actually built a better ledger architecture with the tangle, which would no longer be based on the blockchain but would actually be based on a DAG ledgers.”
Validity of DAG Technology and its Advantages
“I do also classify Iota as an OG project, and I thought they were super differentiated in the space by this DAG technology. I’m curious if you know as the last six-seven years as you guys have been growing, has that technology proven to be a differentiating competitive advantage or something that’s better or just different than the regular blockchain consensus that some of these major chains have?”
“It’s a very good question, and honestly, like if you pioneer a new piece of technology, and we can absolutely say that Iota was the pioneer of DAG ledgers, you get a lot of hate for it and you get a lot of criticism. And I think some of the criticism that Iota has received over the years was very valid, and we have really worked diligently to address that.”
Latest Updates: Shimmer Network and Layer 1 Networks
“I saw in the recent news that your team’s working on some new layer 1 networks that are even more innovative. I’d love to hear about those updates and what your team has built there.”
“You know, one of the premises of D5 is break things fast, but if you think about the layer 1 blockchain where you’re probably gonna host thousands of different applications, you need to take a very different approach because if you break it and there’s a double spend or people lose their money is one of their ultimate sins that you can commit as a team. And so as a layer 1 protocol, we want to take a very safe and secure approach to validate every protocol upgrade that we have, and that’s exactly why we actually launched Shimmer Network because in our release cycle of new protocol features, we need to have a dedicated network where we can first introduce these exciting new features to test and validate them in the network so that later on they can actually be upgraded to Iota, and that is the Shimmer Network.”
Growth of Decentralized Applications on Iota
“I sometimes look into new projects launching, and it’s not often that I hear about projects that are launching on Iota, and I’m curious about that growth.”
“It’s been non-existent because Iota never had smart contracts, so we had a very different focus until 2020, where we really work with big companies primarily, so it was like so like enterprise adoption, not really community adoption. But with the rise of DeFi and NFTs, we saw that also sort of had this introspective, right, realizing that instead of focusing on working with industry partners ourselves, we should rather empower the ecosystem to build on top of our technology, right? So, that’s why we had this two-year process to upgrade our ledger so that the community could actually build. I would actually say that our ecosystem is only launching now with Shimmer, and so at the moment, there’s around 70 dApps already that are signed up.
