- The IOTA Smart Contract Protocol (ISCP) and Mana will provide financial incentives with IOTA tokens for early adopters.
- According to co-founder David Sønstebø, it will be challenging to overtake Ethereum due to the network effect.
Only on Christmas Day, co-founder Dominik Schiener commented on the liquidity of the IOTA token and its value proposition. One day later, David Sønstebø and Charlie Varley, technical director of the IOTA Foundation, also commented on this topic and the future of the IOTA token via Discord.
Sønstebø, who was recently dismissed from the IOTA Foundation board but will continue to work on his own IOTA-related projects, acknowledged that it will be difficult to overtake Ethereum due to its network effect. To gain market share, however, IOTA has a strategy, he said:
For sure, we need a lot of comparisons. As I always say: 1 demonstration outweighs 1000 presentations. […] I am 100% confident in its success though, but we also have to accept the fact that Ethereum has the networking effect. Catching up isn’t as easy as shipping a ‘better product’, one has to actually convey it in a manner which garners attention.
IOTA smart contracts key to increasing utility
The oft-invoked “Cambrian explosion” will happen when IOTA launches its smart contract protocol (ISCP), Sønstebø said. As the IOTA co-founder stated, it will be “hard to beat IOTA at the protocol level. However, to really catalyze this, there needs to be an incentive for early adopters.” That incentive will come with the “certificate/governance structure of the smart contract committees.”
Regarding functionality, Sønstebø said that it is “too early to go into depth.” However, he said his vision is that “it is tied to Mana and be more like a DAO than a subsidiary of our non-profit German organization.” Sønstebø also reiterated the last aspect, the role of the German-based foundation for the ecosystem, as a key point of the “beef” with the IOTA Foundation
I have a lot of exciting prospective opportunities for the community to get in on early. The whole ‘beef’ was merely that I do not want a German organization to own all interesting ideas in the ecosystem. Nothing else. I will inform people when the time is right.
The statement that smart contracts will be a key to the boost utility and adoption of the IOTA token was confirmed by Charlie Varley. For now, he said, IOTA can only be used for lending on Bitfinex. Celcius does list the IOTA token as “coming soon,” but beyond that, the opportunities to make money with IOTA are not existing. In terms of future developments, however, Varley explained further:
But the real ability to earn from IOTA comes with smart contracts and mana. […] The ability to earn money will come with smart contracts. But applications will come before that. The buy in we have from big businesses (like Dell and JLR) is no mistake (as much as trolls on r/cc might like to tell you otherwise. IOTA has a value proposition that no other coins has in feeless immutable data.
