Story Highlights
- IOTA Foundation aims to tokenize billions of real-world assets like real estate, art, and commodities on its distributed ledger, bridging the analog and digital worlds.
- IOTA’s unique use of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology offers scalability advantages over traditional blockchains.
- IOTA is positioning itself as the key to unlocking blockchain’s transformative potential by enabling massive-scale tokenization of real-world assets.
In an exclusive interview, IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener laid out the foundation’s ambitious plans to bring billions of real-world assets onto its distributed ledger through tokenization. The non-profit aims to bridge the divide between the analog and digital worlds on an unprecedented scale.
From Crypto Roots to Real-World Focus
Though born out of the early cryptocurrency movement, Schiener says “While we might not use the term “IoT” much longer, automation and digitization are more prevalent than ever. The IOTA Foundation, nevertheless has enlarged its scope and nowadays focuses more on tokenization.”
According to Schiener, most of the world’s value remains trapped in analog, offline assets like real estate, art, and commodities. “The ability to tokenize assets and make use of them in an immutable, self-determined fashion that does not require any middlemen is what’s missing in our current, highly digitized life. It also is the biggest untapped market — most value on this planet is stuck in dormant, analog assets.”
IOTA’s game plan is to act as that bridging technology, allowing real-world assets (RWAs) to be represented and traded digitally via tokens on its distributed ledger.
A Unique DLT Approach
Underpinning this ambitious vision is IOTA’s novel use of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology instead of a traditional blockchain. “we started from zero and were the first to make use of a directed acyclic graph that allows for parallelization.” said Schiener.
This parallel computation offers major scalability advantages over linear blockchains. But achieving true concurrency required overcoming major technical hurdles, which IOTA has now solved according to its founder.
From IoT to RWA: Evolving Use Cases
While IOTA originated in the Internet of Things space, its focus has decidedly shifted. The foundation already has notable RWA projects underway in trade finance, supply chain tracking, and digitizing product records.
Next up is bringing the multi-trillion dollar RWA market onto its distributed ledger through tokenization. “Now we are taking this to the next level by entering RWA tokenization to bring billions of assets on-chain to IOTA,” Schiener stated.
Ultimately, Schiener sees IOTA as the key to unlocking the full, transformative potential that blockchain technology promises. “With IOTA, we want to be the ones to realize blockchain’s full potential and get it adopted in the real world.”
With its sights set on tokenizing assets at a massive scale, IOTA is charting an ambitious, asset-focused path toward realizing that decentralized future.
