IOTA is making waves

IOTA (MIOTA) was benefited from a 8% price boost on Monday morning after Jaguar Land Rover announced the development of IOTA smart wallets in their vehicles.

However, as some of you might remember, this isn’t the first time IOTA has been courted by major automobile companies. In 2018, Audi announced a partnership with the Germany-based cryptocurrency which saw the two groups create prototype uses for the Tangle.

The new deal with Jaguar Land Rover has apparently already seen IOTA cryptocurrency wallets installed and tested in vehicles, including the Jaguar F-PACE and the Range Rover Velar. The long-term goal is to have vehicles automatically tip each other for various on-road services, such as changing lanes, reporting accidents, ride-sharing, and more. Jaguar Land Rover said they were aiming for “zero emissions, zero accidents, and zero congestion” in the long run — a pretty forward looking goal if you ask me.

IOTA’s co-founder, Dominik Schiener, said:

“The smart wallet technology … can be easily adapted into all new vehicles. IOTA wants to enable interoperability with all these different players. So there is no Jaguar coin, no BMW coin, but one universal token for this machine economy.”

No hard date has been given for when the ‘smart cars’ will become commercially available.

At the time of writing, IOTA fundamentals have been improving, at a very slow pace. The latest Trinity wallet was released successfully in early 2019, however, the community hasn’t seen much real traction and progress in:

1. Using the coin for automation and machine-to-machine economy
2. The problem of the central coordinator, or training-wheels, as IOTA still needs a central node coordinating all transactions, given the DAG-based structure.

IOTA/USD

On Binance, during the weekend, the value of IOTA jumped to $0.34 in just a few hours after the Jaguar Land Rover news was announced in Reuters. That amounts to 8% growth, and came with the highest MIOTA trade volume witnessed since last weekend’s drop.

If MIOTA is able to keep above its 50-day EMA, we might see a sudden move upwards. We should hope price closes above this key level of $0.3.

Volume-wise, the picture is looking a little bit gloomy, as I see sellers taking control around this level.

All of this comes at the end of a month in which MIOTA had just lost 32% of its value. The coin price reached as high as $0.38 in early April, before plunging to $0.25, just a few days afterwards.

What does the future hold?

The IOTA project has not been without criticism over the years, especially after security flaws were discovered in the technology back in 2017, causing trading on Bitfinex to be briefly disrupted.

2018 was a more fruitful year for the company, as numerous industries showed interest in IOTA, including Denmark’s largest energy firm and a Dubai-based group aiming to build crypto-linked ‘smart cities’.

Holders of the coin may have been getting impatient over the course of the last quarter. Whereas many altcoins have doubled, trebled or quadrupled since the December low, IOTA struggled to move far above its own December low of $0.20.

With increased adoption and token utility, I see no reason for MIOTA to not come-back to the top 10 contenders in the future.