New ‘IOTA Ecosystem’ backed by 21.7 Ti Development Fund Announced
In a blog post published in the first week of February, the IOTA Foundation gave us a first look at the new ‘IOTA Ecosystem’, due to be launched in March later this year. Taking inspiration from https://developers.google.com/, the Ecosystem is designed to be a platform to organize and house all aspects of the growing IOTA community and foster innovation.
Not only will it be a place for open-source DAPPs built on top of the IOTA protocol, but it will also be a resource for education, developer tools such as utilities, modules, second layer applications & libraries, news & media, hackathons and philanthropic initiatives for social and environmental causes. It will truly be a one stop shop for everything IOTA!
At this point, you may be thinking ‘that all sounds great, but how will this technological utopia be funded?’. It is certainly true that an endeavour such as this will require substantial resources if it is to succeed, but this is where the Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF) comes into play. The EDF was set up some time ago because members of the community believed that a fun separate to the Foundation would be needed in order to help build the ecosystem.
Coming entirely from community donations, the fund raised 20.7 Ti, or around $200,000 at the time. However, at its current market value it is now worth nearly $41 million! What’s more, this could easily double if/when IOTA recovers from the current bear market.
The Foundation are aiming for the governance of the EDF and Ecosystem to be as decentralized and transparent as possible, with a focus on community management. This will be achieved through a voting system integrated into the Tangle to facilitate nomination of new proposals and initiatives. There will also be a reputation system to build trust and accountability on the platform, as well as a suite of metrics and indicators for analyzing projects.
And that is really only scratching the surface. The IOTA Ecosystem could really fast track the development of applications for the protocol and lead to huge improvements in work efficiency! We strongly recommend you check out the full article to get an idea of the massive scope of this new initiative.
