IOTA Foundation: Building a Minimal Viable Ecosystem for Smart Cities

When Wilfried Pimenta de Miranda joined the IOTA project as Director for Business Development in early 2017, his mandate was to demonstrate the potential of the open-source technology and increase adoption. The open community programme sought to engage with external market players to kick off a first set of proofs of concept. The announcement that Robert Bosch Venture Capital had acquired IOTA tokens created quite a buzz as a pioneer of investment in distributed ledger technology. In November 2017, IOTA launched an open data marketplace to test the technology and illustrate its potential use for data integrity and the monetisation of data streams sourced by IoT devices across multiple industries. As of 2019, what steps were needed for IOTA to scale up – beyond showcasing an initial set of use cases? How could the IOTA team engage with market players to trigger the exploration of new data-driven business models and ensure market pull? While the not-for-profit IOTA Foundation had relied on donations and government grants, could more sustainable sources of funding be found to support its activity?