A few days ago on IOTA‘s official blog, it was announced that the project has been selected to take part in phase 2 of the EU’s European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI).
We are honored to be selected by the @EU_Commission to develop #blockchain innovations based on #IOTA for the next phase of the EU Blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement (#PCP)! Find out where we’ll be focusing our research for the next 6 months. https://t.co/vMWx8CgDP9
— IOTA (@iota) January 13, 2022
IOTA in the EU EBSI project
The post reveals that the IOTA Foundation will receive support from the European Commission to develop and test innovations that can contribute to future evolutions of the European blockchain-based services infrastructure.
In fact, the IOTA Foundation has been selected as one of five contractors for phase 2A of the pre-commercial procurement that will develop prototypes for testing to identify which ones could bring promising improvements to future versions of EBSI.
With this in mind, the foundation has received funding to research, develop and test the use of IOTA’s technology in some key areas such as:
- interoperability,
- scalability,
- energy efficiency
- security,
- consensus,
- identity,
- governance.
The EBSI phases
During phase 1, the IOTA Foundation was selected along with six other projects out of more than 35 applicants, and of these seven projects, only five will now enter phase 2.
Phase 2A will last six months and will allow IOTA to develop more scalable, energy-efficient, secure and interoperable prototypes. These prototypes will be developed together with Software AG, and at the end of the six months, the European Commission will evaluate the technical results to select the three projects that will advance to Phase 2B.
This other phase is expected to last one year and will develop the final solutions and carry out field tests.
The main goal of the IOTA foundation in Phase 2A will be to integrate the IOTA protocol on the EBSI testing infrastructure.
IOTA and the MIOTA crypto
From a technical point of view, the peculiarity of IOTA is that it uses the so-called Tangle Tree as a sharding solution, i.e. a structure based on a “root” network that connects to a potentially very large number of secondary networks through a series of intermediate networks.
Until a few years ago, the IOTA project was one of the main evolving projects within the crypto ecosystem, but due to some technical problems, it has lost a lot of enthusiasm.
Its native cryptocurrency, MIOTA, has slipped to 52nd place overall among cryptocurrencies with the highest market capitalization, behind Helium, Tezos, Elrond and Harmony. With a market capitalization of just over $3 billion, it is worth half of XLM (Stellar) and just over a tenth of LUNA (Terra).
News of EBSI’s Phase 2 may have played a role in MIOTA’s +6% rise over the past week, but its price is roughly the same as it was a month ago, and 78% below its all-time high of 19 December 2017. However, the current price is still 166% higher than it was a year ago, given that after 2017 it came to lose as much as 97% of its value from the highs.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/01/17/iota-fase-2-ebsi-ue/