dailyhodl.com
The native asset for a crypto project focused on the Internet of Things soared by 31% this week amid the launch of a new $100 million ecosystem foundation.
IOTA is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that aims to serve as the backbone of the Internet of Things.
The project’s native token is trading around $0.236 at time of writing, up from $0.180 one week ago. The 78th-ranked crypto asset by market cap is also up nearly 45% in the past month.
The token’s price jumped on Wednesday after the project announced the rollout of the new IOTA Ecosystem DLT Foundation, which is registered with the Abu Dhabi Global Market in the United Arab Emirates.
IOTA says the foundation will be seeded with more than $100 million worth of IOTA tokens that will vest over the next four years.
“This funding is earmarked for nurturing the IOTA ecosystem and accelerating the growth of the IOTA protocol. In line with its community-driven ethos, the IOTA Ecosystem DLT Foundation will foster valuable partnerships in the region to advance the adoption of IOTA and its staging network, Shimmer, across various sectors. This includes collaboration with institutional investors, governments, and academic institutions for the tokenization of real-world assets and bringing them on-chain, thus bringing billions of dollars into the UAE’s virtual assets space.”
IOTA also says it plans to become fully compatible with the Ethereum (ETH) Virtual Machine (EVM) in the first quarter of next year.
“With new headquarters in the UAE, IOTA will evolve from being an enterprise DLT network, to becoming a competitive layer-1 blockchain in web3 and crypto. In Q1, IOTA will become fully EVM-compatible, opening the gates to a thriving DeFi, Gaming and DApp ecosystem.”