IOTA Rockets Upwards, Registering an 18.5% Gain Last Week

By

Major cryptocurrencies were trading in the red early on May 30 before turning green, but the global crypto market cap is still down 0.1% to now stand at $1.2 trillion. The market volume meanwhile decreased by about 10% and is at $31.3 billion.

The volume of all stablecoins is currently at $22.44 billion, which is almost 72% of the total crypto market's 24-hour volume.

According to data provider Kaiko's research, ever since the March banking crisis, crypto trading volume has been in the doldrums, but Tether's market cap is fast approaching a new all-time high, with the total supply currently at $83.28 billion. This makes sense, given that more than 50% of all trades are executed using USDT, signifying that Tether's primary use case is for trading on centralized exchanges.

Meanwhile, on DEXs, USDC remains the dominant stablecoin whose market cap is at $29 bln though USDT possesses a healthy market share here too.

Data from crypto data provider Glassnode, too, shows that there is accumulation happening in USDT, USDC, and BUSD across top centralized exchanges (CEXs) like Coinbase and Binance. Recently, BUSD's transaction volume hit a 1-month high, and the number of USDC exchange withdrawals on a 7-day moving average dropped to the lowest value seen this year.

Bitcoin, however, remains the dominant crypto asset, accounting for 44.6% of the entire crypto market cap. On Tuesday, BTC neared the $28k mark, rallying on news that a proposed 30% tax on cryptocurrency miners' energy consumption in the US could be shelved as part of a bipartisan debt ceiling deal.

A draft bill issued by US lawmakers proposed a two-year debt ceiling suspension but didn't include President Joe Biden's desired tax hikes for corporations and wealthy individuals. While a tentative agreement has been reached, the bill still requires approval from a divided House of Representatives, with the vote expected on Wednesday, ahead of a potential June default deadline.

BTC reserves on CEXs, meanwhile, have been decreasing steadily since November 2022, suggesting a drying up of supply. The market is regarding it as part of the pre-halving accumulation period for Bitcoin and the overall crypto market, as per the four-year cycle theory.

Besides BTC, Ether balances on exchanges have also fallen to a five-year low at 17.8 million ETH. Ever since the "Merge" upgrade, which set its annual deflation rate at 0.11%, the supply of Ethereum has decreased by more than 80,000 ETH.

Other coins are also rallying, with Quant (5%), XRP (4.8%), Filecoin (4.7%), and LDO (4.5%) recording the most gains in the past 24 hours in the top 100 crypto assets by market cap. Meanwhile, this past week, Injective (10.5%), XRP (8.7%), Quant (8.3%), The Sandbox (7.1%), and LDO (6.9%) were among the top performers.

The biggest performer in the crypto market, however, has been IOTA. With 6.9% gains in the past 24 hours and an 18.5% upside in the past week, IOTA is leading the market in both time frames.

IOTA is the 71st largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $614 million, recording $34.8 million in 24-hour trading volume.

While IOTA managed to see 29% gains in 2023 so far, the coin is down a whopping 96% from its all-time high (ATH) of $5.25 hit over five years ago in Dec. 2017. During the 2021 bull market, IOTA price only managed to spike at around $2.6, only half the previous bull market peak.

In Dec. 2015, IOTA held an ICO for its IOTA tokens, offering 1 MIOTA (1 million IOTA) for $0.001 worth of BTC. All IOTA tokens were created at the start of the ICO, with its total supply capped at 2.8 quadrillions.

At the time, the project raised around $500,000 for the development of the project. However, only 60% of the MIOTA supply was claimed by ICO participants, and the remaining 40% went back to the project.

The same year the token was made available on a crypto exchange, IOTA's price skyrocketed over 1,000,000% to hit a peak that saw its market cap reaching over $12 bln and secured its place among the top 10 cryptos.

However, during the COVID crash in March 2020, IOTA's price hit its all-time low at just under $0.082. Following this, major tension broke out between the IOTA Foundation board. This caused co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo to leave the project, and the network suffered several days of shutdowns.

IOTA is the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain-based project IOTA, a transaction settlement and data transfer layer for the Internet of Things (IoT). It was co-founded in 2015 by German entrepreneur Dominik Schiener, Norwegian entrepreneur David Sønstebø, Russian mathematician Serguei Popov, and Belarusian software engineer Ivancheglo. Three years later, in 2018, the IOTA Foundation was established to guide the continuing development of IOTA.

Unlike other blockchains, it uses a centralized distributed network system distributed ledger called the Tangle, which is based on a data structure referred to as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).

Tangle doesn't use a blockchain. Instead, its transactions can be attached to any part of the system instead of on a single point of a blockchain, as is the case with traditional blockchains. This allows Tangle to validate and store transactions in parallel and quickly scale the processing of transactions.

There are no miners or blocks in the Tangle. Every transaction on the Iota network must validate two previous transactions through a small proof-of-work (PoW), which allows the network to become more efficient as it scales. For Tangle, IOTA's "Coordinator" network node validator messages, which is an application independently run by the IOTA Foundation.

While IOTA has formed partnerships with major companies like Volkswagen, Dell Technologies, Jaguar Land Rover, Bosch, and Cisco, none of them were fully developed, which drew criticism from the community and the market at large.

Click here to learn all about investing in IOTA (MIOTA).

The latest price action in IOTA comes while the digital asset has been trading within a bullish Falling Wedge Formation on its weekly chart for a considerable period of time, adding to the possibility of IOTA finally breaking free from this formation.

IOTA price has actually been making a slow recovery for some time now as the network regains momentum. For starters, its Shimmer EVM testnet is going well, with the number of active users jumping past 247k in the past few months.

Shimmer is an important part of the IOTA ecosystem as it will form the basis of dApps development on the platform in the future. It features faster speeds and lower costs and will be EVM compatible, meaning that dApps in the ecosystem will be able to communicate with Ethereum.

The team behind IOTA Foundation and the Shimmer network has been actively working on the ShimmerEVM testnet, which was launched in late March 2023. Last month, the ShimmerEVM testnet attained the milestone of 1 million in both transactions and the total number of active addresses.

Shimmer is a staging network that is feeless and scalable to enable frictionless, decentralized Web3 economies. It is the first EVM-enabled launch on Iota that creates fully customizable smart contract chains. The multi-chain network has its own token called SMR.

In another development this week, the IOTA team released its first monthly update on the ongoing IOTA 2.0 node software. The report unveiled some technical advances, including the implementation of the Mempool to adopt an "in-memory paradigm." The team has also modified iota.go to provide support for accounts on the UTXO level.

Meanwhile, Stardust-ready transactions would run on iota-core protocol, which is set to become the first fully decentralized node software protocol design for the mainnet. It would be responsible for the running of the Shimmer network initially as well as powering the network in the future.

Last week, IOTA also collaborated with Digimarc Corporation to create a Digital Product Passport (DPP) blueprint in support of some European Union (EU) initiative requirements such as open standards, decentralized architectures, and accessibility. Besides this, IOTA Foundation also teamed up with the EU to combat money laundering and terrorism using lightning-fast technology.

The EU DPP initiative aims to improve the sustainability of products entering the European market by requiring them to have their own accessible digital identity. Here, Digimarc's platform will be used to build passport data and identities with IOTA DLT to provide a layer of trust.

Recently, IOTA founder Schiener also held a conversation with Thani Al Zeyoudi, the minister of foreign trade in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), regarding the role IOTA can play in the economy. However, no details have been disclosed regarding the different scopes of projects they would be working on.

But this is not all. With generative artificial intelligence (AI) becoming the talk of the town, IOTA-powered search engine Xayn is currently looking to compete against it. To combat the misuse of AI, it plans to leverage IOTA's Tangle technology. The Berlin-based company specializes in semantic search that allows people to use natural language to find information.

Schiner also praised the project's recent developments, which boast delivering 40 times better energy performance. Xayn facilitates the responsible use of AI by offering transparency and user control through decentralization.

To fight AI's misuse, Xayn has incorporated IOTA's Tangle technology "to record the hash of the decrypted aggregated AI model that was computed in a round of federated learning."

Amidst all this, the IOTA Foundation has also kickstarted the sixth round of staking for the Assembly Tokens (ASMB) that will continue until mid-August this year. In this event, 20% of the entire ASMB token supply has been allotted to IOTA stakers that'll be distributed over the next two years.

Click to learn how to buy IOTA (MIOTA) in just four steps.

Gaurav started trading cryptocurrencies in 2017 and has fallen in love with the crypto space ever since. His interest in everything crypto turned him into a writer specializing in cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Soon he found himself working with crypto companies and media outlets. He is also a big-time Batman fan.