The IOTA team recently announced that its ecosystem development grant was awarded to six projects that are building on the networks’ platform. This was made known on the IOTA blog site in a post seen by Cryptoinfowatch on January 20. According to the release,
“The funded projects range among a full node software written in Go, a new semi-permanode solution, a swift library and awareness building & educational material.”
Growth of the platform and strengthening the network to reach its full potential is the objective of the grant.
TangleKit GbR
TangleKit GbR received 154,500 euro. The company’s proof of work as a service concept is designed to build products and services on IOTA technology. It is especially important for devices with low computational ability.
According to the founders of the company, Sebastian Fuchs, Maximilian Hase and Alexander Sporn:
“By supporting the development of different fullnode implementations like IRI, cIRI and Hercules, and also by creating a high performance IOTA transaction spammer with multiple attack strategies, we gained a lot of knowledge about the IOTA technology. We want to give this knowledge back to the community in the form of an optimized open-source full node software.
The main goal of this project is to achieve feature parity with IRI v1.8.0. In addition, HORNET will try to solve currently known bottlenecks which exist in IRI’s implementation (i.e. tip-selection).”
AION
Another beneficiary of the grant is AION which received 56,240 euro. AION was founded by Olaf Van Wijk best known for his work in IOTA-pay. The company is involved in data, security, AI and privacy.
According to Olaf,
“After I built a few test applications and proof of concepts on top of IOTA, I kept on running against the same problem: Where has my data gone? Snapshots! It is either: host the entire tangle or delete everything. After my research on separating the API calls from the internal storage of IRI, it struck me!
When AION is finished, I believe it will provide a great boost in IOTA development, and with the EDF grant I can make sure it is open source and available for the entire community!”
IOTAKit
The third recipient of the grant is IOTAKit which got $7000. The company is a software firm involved in the development of iOS on the internet of things platform. They are contributor to the Trinity wallet in the area of speeding up thing with iOS devices.
The company CEO, Pasquale Ambrosini said,
“I think IOTA has made great strides in recent years, but there is still a lot to do and IOTAKit wants to help developers make it easier to integrate IOTA in iOS/macOS applications.
About 40% of smartphones use Swift (iOS). Offering the right tools to native developers means improving adoption, and at the same time simplify the life for developers by making the tools more efficient.
This is IOTAKit, a great library made (with love) from developers to developers.”
IOTA Developer Essentials and Lab
The other beneficiaries are IOTA Developer Essentials and Lab which got $8,160. They are working on onboarding materials and hope to complete the study in that field to integrate at least three programming languages.
Everything Tangle
Everything Tangle got $13,475. This is a YouTube channel focused on the IOTA community. They provide educational materials for the community and presently have more than 20,000 subscribers and more than 500,000 views. The high quality educational materials they use in supporting IOTA made the foundation proud associating with the channel.
Hugo Gregersen
$12,000 was awarded to Hugo Gregersen known for working to integrate physical devices with IOTA. Gregersen is a developer who writes easy to use essays that helps people understand how to work with IOTA through integration of everyday devices. He is a co-author of “IOTA for Dummies”.
The IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF) also announced the launch of its new website. Interested community members can check it for listings and updates.
