IOTA teams up with Austrian uni for Internet of Things and blockchain research lab

The IOTA Foundation is teaming up with one of Austria’s most prestigious universities to foster research in distributed ledger technologies.

The IOTA Foundation, the non-profit organization behind IOTA, IOTA Tangle and MIOTA, announced they will be joining Austria’s newest Christian Doppler Laboratory, or CDL, as an industrial partner.

The first of its kind, the laboratory is housed at the Vienna University of Technology and named the CDL Blockchain Technologies for the Internet of Things, or CDL-BOT.

The laboratory was officially opened in a digital ceremony on Nov. 26 by Austrian Federal Minister for Digital & Economic Affairs Margarethe Schramböck. It will focus on research and development in public/private partnerships between institutions and businesses seeking to expand the implementation of distributed ledger technologies, or DLT, in everyday use scenarios.

IOTA is joining CDL-BOT along with its new research partner, Pantos, which bills itself as “the first multi-blockchain token system.” Pantos is an offshoot of BitPanda, a Vienna-based trading platform for cryptocurrencies and other assets, such as gold.

Prof. Stefan Schulte, who is leading the newly established lab, remarked:

“With the rising number of potential application areas for DLT-based payments and data exchange in the Internet of Things, new DLTs have to be integrated, and interoperability between different DLTs becomes necessary. I am looking forward to doing joint research with the IOTA Foundation and Pantos in order to find novel solutions to this highly topical topic.”

Launched as Jinn in 2014, IOTA’s goal is to implement their platform as the de facto standard for DLT and Internet of Things, or IoT, devices — which is currently experiencing unprecedented economic growth. Using IOTA as an operational standard, each IoT device would be able to transmit data and payment information to other devices connected to the IOTA mainnet.

On Nov. 24, IOTA completed a standardization update to help assure interoperability between devices and systems using IOTA-based software. In October, the IOTA Foundation announced it would be working with the government of Japan on a project seeking to transform the country’s industrial infrastructure using its systems.

The IOTA network can now theoretically handle up to 1,000 transactions per second thanks to an August upgrade dubbed Chrysalis.

Although IOTA has faced criticisms in the past of being overly centralized, the IOTA Foundation plans to become a fully decentralized network by Q1 2021.

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