- IOTA, Pantos and the Vienna University of Technology have announced the opening of a Christian Doppler Laboratory for Blockchain/DLT research
- One focus of the research will be the interoperability between different DLTs.
A few minutes ago, the IOTA Foundation (IF) announced in a press release shared with CNF that it has joined the new Christian Doppler Laboratory called Blockchain Technologies for the Internet of Things (CDL-BOT) as an industrial partner. As the IF stated, the research group located at the Institute for Information Systems Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology will conduct cutting-edge research on DLT interoperability, on the interface of DLT with the Internet of Things, and on support services for developers.
The laboratory was opened just today, November 26, by the Austrian Federal Minister for Digital and Economic Affairs, Dr. Margarethe Schramböck, at a digital conference attended by IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener. As the IOTA Foundation states, joint research in a network of leading universities, public research institutions and private sector partnerships is a key to the development of open source technologies and infrastructures for a trusted Internet of Things.
The CDL-BOT is a long-term research project with an expected duration of seven years, employing several postdoctoral and PhD students under the direction of Prof. Stefan Schulte. For the IOTA Foundation, the establishment of this project is uniquely designed to not only expand research on the IOTA Tangle and its applications on the Internet of Things itself, but also to look beyond the IOTA protocol to promote the European DLT ecosystem.
In this sense, the interoperability between different DLTs will be investigated. The research work will range from cross-blockchain token transfers to cross-blockchain smart contract invocation and interaction, as well as providing client-side blockchain interoperability through developer support.. Prof. Stefan Schulte, who heads the newly established lab, commented:
With the rising number of potential application areas for DLT-based payments and data exchange in the Internet of Things, new DLTs have to be integrated, and interoperability between different DLTs becomes necessary. I am looking forward to doing joint research with the IOTA Foundation and Pantos in order to find novel solutions to this highly topical topic.
The Christian Doppler Laboratory is funded by the state-funded Christian Doppler Society, an Austrian pioneer in enabling successful cooperation between science and industry. The collaboration will contribute to the development of products and processes at the IOTA Foundation and Pantos, a subsidiary of Bitpanda. Eric Demuth, co-founder and CEO of Bitpanda said:
To bring the industry to the next level, the interoperability of blockchains as well as the integrity of data should be top priority. We believe that our partnership with the Christian Doppler Gesellschaft, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Digital and Economic Affairs as well as the IOTA Foundation enables us to stay at the forefront of interoperability development in order to solve one of the biggest complexities in this young but steadily maturing industry.
For IOTA Foundation, the Christian Doppler Laboratory is a further step to strengthen academic research on the Tangle and to do so in partnership with leading European private sector initiatives to ensure the relevance of such activities across industries. Dominik Schiener commented the initiative as follows:
We are honored to be part of this long-term research project and are grateful to the Christian Doppler Gesellschaft and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Digital and Economic Affairs for acknowledging and supporting the enormous potential of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology towards building a more transparent, trusted and connected economy.
Together with the world leading academic institution TU Wien and Pantos as a cutting-edge technology provider, we will jointly focus on the interoperable transfer of digital assets and trusted Internet of Things while expanding our footprint in Austria specifically.
