IOTA's Meteoric Breakout: Digital Asset of the Future

IOTA does not pause, and may be having more than a temporary breakout, as the coin has serious claims to becoming the digital asset of the future.

IOTA has seen a lot of criticism, but finally proved its strength. Therise in market priceshas been meteoric, with MIOTA (one million IOTA) doubling overnight.

After months of hovering around 40 cents, the listing on Coinone, the Korean exchange, made IOTA explode. And as usual, digital assets are trading to mad levels in Korea, where MIOTA trades at a premium of $8, but is not included in the calculation at CoinMarketCap.

With this rate of growth, IOTA has a claim at even higher positions, displacing Bitcoin Cash, or possibly even Ethereum.

Yet as a digital asset, IOTA coins are still not usable, as the network for distributed computation is still in the experimental state and mostly used for test cases with universities or businesses. Yet the rise of IOTA is independent of the moves of Bitcoin, as in the past the coin was sold off to purchase more BTC and its price was depressed along with other altcoins.

Some believe the rise of IOTA is only temporary, with no need for the coin to command the high prices, given that its aim is to be a utility token in the Internet of Things, a still hypothetical proposition.

"Where can I short$iota? This is the dumbest thing I think I’ve seen in crypto to date.pic.twitter.com/bL5VzKRHnx"

The breakout in IOTA has generated talk of the potential of Ripple, or XRP, to break out of the levels below a dollar. However, Ripple (XRP) has a much larger circulating supply of 38 billion coins. MIOTA is a larger unit of 1,000 IOTA coins, but separate IOTAs have a very low price and a large circulation supply.

The IOTA project may just prove that blockchains are obsolete, but it has yet to become a usable unit of transfer in machine interactions. The IOTA project also had a long period of technical troubles, mostly related to an attempt to write a proprietary hash function which did not work as well as ready-made and time-proven hashing mechanisms.

The IOTA wallet is also inconveniencing users, who find it hard to discover the balances due to the nature of the "tangle" system, where discovering and verifying an address includes several communication attempts.