The IOTA Foundation will become an industrial partner of the new Christian Doppler Laboratory, Blockchain Technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT). The Laboratory at the Technical University of Vienna was officially opened on Thursday by Austria’s Federal Minister for Digital and Economic Affairs to research distributed ledger technology (DLT) interoperability. Its research project is expected to run for seven years and employ postdoctoral and doctoral students.
IOTA will use the project to expand research on IOTA Tangle and its applications for IoT. The IOTA Tangle is a DLT that aims to solve blockchain shortcomings such as scalability and cost.
DLT interoperability usually refers to how different blockchains or DLTs exchange data and money, so cross-blockchain token transfers and cross-blockchain smart contracts.
“With the rising number of potential application areas for DLT-based payments and data exchange with Internet of Things, new DLTs have to be integrated, and interoperability between different DLTs becomes necessary,” said Prof. Stefan Schulte, the leader or the new lab.
Interoperability project Pantos, supported by Austrian cryptocurrency exchange Bitpanda, will also be involved in the Laboratory’s project. It has an existing relationship with the university.
Meanwhile, IOTA recently faced a wallet outage and temporarily halted part of its network to investigate the wallet thefts. Nevertheless, IOTA is still partnering with major organizations such as Jaguar Land Rover. They’re collaborating on an open-source framework that builds access control systems to open cars or other smart locks. Jaguar had previously worked with IOTA on the development of smart wallets. The Foundation is also involved in Dig IT, an EU-funded project aimed at increasing sustainability in the mining industry,
