Lets just discuss IOTA.
am happy to announce that the IOTA Foundation will be established!
After great community effort we have reached the minimum goal. Counting the binding pledges, the donations to the foundation addresses and manual claims we have reached the goal of 5% and will go full speed ahead with the Foundation plans. However for those that haven't donated yet, don't read this as "so I don't have to donate?" 5% is absolutely nothing compared to other projects in the space, so donations are still very much a priority.
What does this mean for IOTA?
It means that the initiators of the IOTA project will continue working full time to realize the vision and mission behind IOTA on the public tangle ledger.
What will the Foundation do?
A complete IOTA Foundation roadmap and website with more detailed information will be published later in the week, but here is a brief summary:
Initiate C and RUST core client development.
Attend Internet-of-Things and Blockchain/Distributed ledger conferences and hackathons in the coming months in active role ( E.G. presentations about IOTA ).
In collaboration with some big holders give out development-bounties.
Be able to strengthen the brand and raise awareness of IOTA in all capacities.
Bring on companies and organizations, especially those focused on Internet-of-Things and blockchain.
Essentially realize the vision which started the R&D of IOTA
Be the de facto public organization behind IOTA
Who will be in the Foundation?
The founding members of the IOTA Foundation will essentially be the founders of IOTA and active early adopters with a proven track record. At the moment: David Sønstebø, Dominik Schiener, Serguei Popov and Sergey Ivancheglo. In addition to this there are 3 others that will most likely be part of it, but is not official yet, more info on this will come later in the week.
What should the rest of the community do?
While the foundation now has been decided on (as long as pledgers don't pull out all of a sudden), it is important that the community don't see this as some major achievement and think that it's time to kickback and watch the fireworks. The community still got ~95% of all total IOTA tokens in existence, make them count. Hire developers to work on ecosystem infrastructure, fund projects on top of IOTA, donate to the people in the community that is making a difference, donate to the foundation etc. We are still only at the beginning, now we must go for momentum
General community update
Some people seem to have been confused about exactly when exchanges will add IOTA. We are working with 4 big exchanges who will all add IOTA, but at the moment the date is impossible to say, and it's not something that is high on the priority list right now. It will happen soon, that's the only thing worth knowing, the more people participate the faster everything will happen.
Another issue that needs addressing is that the tolerance for trolling/drama instigation in the IOTA Slack will be set to a very low threshold for the following weeks. IOTA is not a socio-political movement, it's squarely focused on creating a layer in the technological stack for developers, activists and entrepreneurs, specifically for Internet-of-Things and other technologies that require it. So from now on all such drama will just result in a swift ban. IOTA Slack is filling up with academics, executives and developers from a plethora of different companies, the people and organizations that IOTA exist for, so anyone that is not contributing to this effort should find another area to spend their time.
Finally the 'Big Deal' initiative coming up, time is ticking quite fast on this at the moment. I encourage everyone to head over to
http://bigdeal.iotatoken.com43 so we can get this realized as soon as possible. A lot of great things will come from it.
Here is to the future of IOTA and Internet-of-Things
