IOTA just gained prominence, as MIOTA rose above $2.40 without a stop, displacing DASH and Litecoin from position 5 on CoinMarketCap. Projections of $3 coming soon started cropping up.
IOTA gained more than 62% overnight, to $2.37. The total breakout this week saw IOTA rise more than 180%.
The IOTA project hovered for months and years cleaning up its concept and battling wallet and encryption hashing problems. But in the past month, IOTA has upped its game, establishing a series of partnerships for a data marketplace in addition to contacting programming talent worldwide, in universities as well as local programming organizations.
"After more than a year of painstaking preparatory work, the Foundation was officially incorporated in Berlin on November 3rd by signature of the State Secretary for Justice. We are exceptionally proud to become the first fully regulated not-for-profit foundation in Germany to be capitalized with a crypto-currency (IOTA Tokens)," announced the company earlier.
Experts from outside the cryptocurrency space see an important measure of a coin's success in the developer activity around it. For IOTA, the appeal for developers is high.
"We found that the best predictor of a cryptocurrency's exchange rate is the amount of developer activity around it," said JP Vergne, professor at Ivey Business School in relation to the future of Ethereum and other digital assets.
The biggest bet of IOTA is the rising trend of connected devices and data gathering. The IOTA cryptocurrency would facilitate the exchange of that data. IOTA will also work toward sharing the data, which for now is mostly inert or used in limited cases.
Some of the boost for IOTA comes from listings on Korean exchanges, with more than 35% of trading coming from Coinone and Binance. Yet Bitfinex is the leader, recently renewing USD deposits to buy IOTA directly.
The biggest appeal of IOTA is the possibility for unlimited growth in the Tangle, a data structure that allows nodes to self-verify and broadcast the transaction to the network.
But it is precisely this system that has led to losses and wallets having trouble discovering their balances.