Dan Simerman: IOTA conceivable as sidechain for Ethereum, EOS, TRON

  • According to Dan Simerman, the integration of EdDSA with phase 2 of Chrysalis will be an important step in driving the adoption of IOTA by companies.
  • As the Head of Financial Relations at the IOTA Foundation explained, the IOTA Tangle could become the fee-less data protocol in crypto space, just as Chainlink is for Oracle.

In a new episode of the IEN Talks series, Terry Shane, the founder and CEO of bIOTAsphere, has interviewed Dan Simerman, Head of Financial Relations at the IOTA Foundation. The latter gave very interesting insights on the topics of adoption, competition and cooperation with other projects.

As Simerman explained at the beginning, the introduction of the standard cryptography EdDSA with Chrysalis phase 2 plays a very crucial role in the adoption of IOTA. EdDSA will enable hardware support for all major architectures. Until now, implementation in any custody solution has not been possible because they always required EdDSA. So with the release of Chrysalis, IOTA partners will be “in a better position”, as Simerman stated:

One of the biggest roadblocks right now to getting adopted are custody solutions. […] So we might talk with a corporate partner or an exchange or an industrial partner b and they might go ‘Are you on BitGo? Oh you are not on BitGo. Once you are on BitGo than we can implement it.’ So it has been quite a big barrier for us for the last year.

As Simerman further explained, there is no fixed timeframe as to when custody providers will integrate IOTA. However, Simerman hopes that the launch of a devnet or testnet will allow providers to begin the integration work soon. He went on to describe that the IOTA Foundation has already contacted several providers for this purpose.

Competition and cooperation of IOTA with other projects

When asked how Simerman sees the position of IOTA in competition with other DLT and blockchain projects, he pointed out that IOTA has a decisive advantage over its competitors: It can send data and values. This gives IOTA a decisive advantage, especially in the corporate sector. As Simerman found out, the IOTA Foundation has made the experience that there are always companies that are not comfortable with the use of a cryptocurrency.

We are the only protocol that can do that. […] and we often downplay how important that is. And the reason why the might not feel comfortable are might be legal issues, holding a token, might be regulatory reasons, they might be waiting for more clarity, there might be accounting based reasons where organisation don’t feel comfortable holding a token.

So Simerman used a metaphor that while IOTA’s competitors are “fast horses”, IOTA is a car:

[…] having an enterprise application where you have to every time someone clicks a link on the app you have to debit Ethereum as Gas tax from it. That doesn’t work in the rea life. So in that sense, every competitor that I see is just a faster horse. I am talking about Polkadot, Comsos, talking about Ethereum, talking baout some of the lower levels such as the Algorands and the Hashgraphs

Asked about the cooperation with the TM Forum, where IOTA is being tested as a data protocol and where another DLT protocol, R3 Corda, is being used, Simerman said that cooperation with other DLT projects is not really a primary goal of the IOTA Foundation. Nevertheless, he could imagine that blockchain projects could use the IOTA Tangle as a fee-less data protocol in the future.

Getting back to the idea that our biggest value proposition is being data protocol. […] There are so many other blockchains hat have their own business development groups that are probably reaching out to similar companies that we are. I am sure they are hitting the snag that ‘we like your technology but we can’t build on you because of the token.’ So my kind of an early thought is, why not make IOTA the data [solution], like Chainlink is the oracle solution.

Why not make IOTA the feeless protocol solution? Why not be able to integrate with let’s say with TRON, EOS, whatever. […] Why not have a sidechain that runs on IOTA. So I don’t know if this is technically possible, I talked to the research and my understanding is that it is. […] That’s really an interesting way to capture a lot of market share, we could be become a de-fact [standard]. […] So I would like to see more protocols to look at the fee less capabilities that we have.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY1IXatyHXc?feature=oembed&w=796&h=448]


Last updated on July 17, 2020