The IOTA Foundation announces that it will focus only on research in the future. Numerous employees will have to leave as a result and entire business units will be spun off separately.
The IOTA Foundation has published a new blog post. In it, far-reaching consequences for the IOTA Foundation and the IOTA ecosystem are announced. Simply summarized, the current structure of the IOTA Foundation can no longer be afforded. This is all the more dramatic when you look at the fact that there are still countless construction sites at IOTA. First of all, there is the coordicide. The Foundation boasts that it has almost completed the research for the Coordicide. But it is a fact that we will not see the Coordicide in the IOTA mainnet in 2022 and whether it will come in 2023 may also be doubted. Especially when we look at how long the Coordicide has been promised to us.
Furthermore, there is still no IOTA mobile wallet. There is a beta of the Firefly wallet but new IOTA users (if there still is one) will not know about it because on the Firefly homepage only the desktop wallets are shown. It’s unbelievable that after so many years there is still no working mobile wallet. Instead, the foundation has run after every trend and has opened up new construction sites left and right (smart contracts, NFTs, shimmer and assembly) instead of first getting the basic technology on the chain. Here the management completely failed. Above all, in the years 2018, 2019 and 2020, according to current knowledge, only money was burned without IOTA really being brought forward. IOTA could therefore already be much further with better management.
Tribute must now be paid to this strategy. As announced in the Foundation’s blog post, numerous employees will have to leave. In addition, various units are to be spun off. It is hoped that these units will be self-financing. Whether this will succeed in the current market environment may be doubted. After all, who would invest in a crypto project based on IOTA (keyword: unclear coordicide). The Foundation has completely missed the window of opportunity here. What can probably hold on for the time being are the projects that are financed from public EU funds and other subsidies. Ultimately, however, the IOTA Foundation wants to focus on research in the future and thus advance the network further.
The whole cost savings are sold with the fact that IOTA wants to set itself up more decentralized. In general, it should be said that the entire cost savings and layoffs could hardly have been formulated better than the Foundation did in the blog post. Chapeau for that! Probably that’s also the reason why many in the community haven’t yet realized the implications of the decisions here. In general, however, it speaks for the Foundation to consistently implement cost-saving measures now. Whether it is already too late for this can unfortunately not be judged at the moment. How much money the foundation still has left depends on how the IOTA price develops.
For IOTA it will now be important to show successes. This would be, for example, a successful Shimmer or Assembly launch. But here, too, it is unclear in the current market environment whether the tokens would achieve an acceptable value at all. Ultimately, the projects are also only of interest to people from the IOTA community. It will be difficult to attract new investors and in the current crypto environment this is as good as impossible.
Conclusion
Due to the high cost pressure generated by the former 171 employees, the IOTA Foundation is splitting up and thus losing significant clout. Whether all projects can be financed further may be doubted at the moment. If we look at the IOTA/BTC price, it is not far from the all-time low, which is of course bitter for investors. Most would have done much better if they had invested in Bitcoin instead of IOTA. There is no sign that this trend will reverse in the near future.
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