IOTA Co-founder Dominik Schiener on a Crypto Comeback 10 Years in the Making

Ten years in crypto is a lifetime. For IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener, it’s also just the beginning.

Originally launched in 2015 with a vision of connecting the Internet of Things to a new kind of distributed ledger, IOTA is now reintroducing itself — armed with a newly upgraded mainnet called Rebased, staking rewards for IOTA holders, and a wider embrace of decentralization.

“I really like this story of reemerging and us coming back with vengeance,” Schiener told Coinage. “IOTA has been on the market for ten years ... and I think what sets us apart… is that we are really mission driven.” Considering how long Schiener has stuck with it, it's hard to argue with that.

From its peak in 2017 as the fourth-largest crypto project by market cap to its more recent quiet rebuild, IOTA’s story mirrors many of the crypto industry's lessons — early hype, long winters, and now, a comeback shaped by pragmatism and persistence.

“I can confidently say that nobody back in those days thought that this space would get this big,” said Schiener, reflecting on raising “1300 bitcoins through an ICO” when launching the project. “Back then it was all about the publishing crazy ideas and concepts on Bitcointalk… look at the industry today where it has become very professionalized.”

But unlike other projects that pivoted into NFTs or memecoins to stay relevant, IOTA doubled down on building in the real world — with a strategy focused on infrastructure for trade and institutional-grade adoption.

“What we've been focused on in IOTA is really focus on this vertical and international trade… We started a project in Kenya in 2019… It already runs in production,” Schiener said. “Now, we're starting to expand it across Africa and also in Europe and the Middle East.”

The infrastructure IOTA has built is being used to digitize trade data, issue digital identities for exporters, and even bring tokenized commodities like rare earth minerals onchain. It’s what Schiener describes as IOTA’s “real yield ecosystem.”

“Where we differentiate with IOTA and where we really want to build up a moat… is everything related to real world adoption,” he said. “We have a lot more credibility and a lot more trust in the market, and we can leverage that trust… to feed them into the DeFi ecosystem.”

That trust, Schiener argues, stems from IOTA’s long-standing choice to avoid the VC-fueled playbook.

“We gave 100% of the token supply to the community. We would never raise capital from investors,” he said. “Look at all of these other VC coins… they were just in it to make a quick buck and to win a single cycle… and then the founders basically retired.”

Despite pursuing a different strategy, IOTA's token price has largely tracked other tokens in the space. However, over the past year as IOTA worked through its re-launch, the token has risen 31%. It's an impressive gain considering the changes that went into IOTA during that time. As Schiener explains, part of the relaunch was tied to abandoning earlier research efforts to pivot into programming options offered by the Move programming language pioneered by Sui.

"We wrote a lot of white papers around that, and we were very confident in [00:19:40] the release of it. But, um, we just also realized that we were building a protocol with a different market in mind, he said reflecting on the market back in 2017. "It was a very difficult decision, but ultimately, we really decided that we have to be pragmatic here and be fast to update the mainnet."

That tradeoff — between loyalty to the original roadmap and delivering faster to market — was ultimately approved by tokenholders. Now, Schiener says IOTA is ready to expand globally, especially in the U.S.

“What we are doing right now is… pilots to ship goods between the U.S. and other countries to really showcase how IOTA can be used to solve a real world problem,” he said. “We are absolutely planning our entry into the US… and also thinking about how we can tokenize some U.S. funds and working together with some institutional financial players.”

The strategy is to focus on capital efficiency — not just attracting TVL, but doing so in a sustainable way. “Our objective is obviously to keep that cost to a minimum and to make sure that there's real interest in participating in that real yield.”

More than a decade after publishing their original white papers, IOTA’s builder-in-chief is still laser-focused on the big picture.

“I want to see IOTA as one of the handful of layer ones… to become a standard, to be this infrastructure on which the world is being digitized,” Schiener said. And if the next cycle favors real-world adoption, Schiener is confident the tides will turn in IOTA’s favor.

“I think we have some real world adoption cases that no other layer one has in this market,” he said. “And I'm sure that the price will catch up sooner than later.”

Over the last month, IOTA's 25% run has outperformed the respective 18% and 10% gains posted by Ethereum and Bitcoin.

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