Feeless transactions

All IOTA transactions are feeless, the receiver always receives the full amount that was sent. The mechanism behind this is that each transaction has to confirm 2 to 8 other transactions.

Each IOTA transaction confirms at least 2 others

No inflation

Because IOTA is feeless, it has no miners. Therefore, the entire max supply was distributed at the ICO, which means there is no inflation. IOTA is also one of the only projects that had a fair distribution: no tokens were awarded to founders. Just like a Satoshi, an IOTA is the smallest divisible unit. Fun fact: comparing the IOTA supply to Satoshi, the supply of IOTA is only 32% larger.

Bitcoin supply comparison with IOTA

Data and value separation

To my knowledge, IOTA is the only feeless project that offers data and value separation. This enables hundreds of use cases that would not be possible otherwise. Companies can build data-driven applications on top of the Tangle without requiring to hold any tokens. You may have heard the phrase "Data is the new oil" before, IOTA is like one big data pipeline which can also tap into the transfer of value when necessary.

IOTA's parallel architecture offers data and value separation

Low energy

IOTA is built with energy efficiency in mind because it should be possible to run on embedded IoT devices. Benchmarks* have shown that a single IOTA transaction could use just 0.0000011 KWh. In comparison:

• One single Nano transaction could power 100 IOTA transactions.
• One single ADA transaction could power 498.090 IOTA transactions.
• One single ETH transaction could power 512.981.818 IOTA transactions.
• One single BTC transaction could power 827.445.454 IOTA transactions.

*IOTA energy benchmarks

Non-profit foundation

IOTA is being developed by the IOTA Foundation, which is a non-profit organization (NPO) based in Germany. In other words, they are bound by German law and can't do anything sketchy compared to other projects ran by shady millionaires from China or wherever. The IOTA Foundation currently has over 160 employees, of which the majority are researchers, mathematicians, and software engineers.

Smart contracts and digital assets

A lot of progress has been made on the ISCP (IOTA Smart Contracts Protocol) and IOTA digital assets in the past year. On June 2nd the IOTA digital assets framework was released on the DevNet, and on June 12th the IOTA NFT marketplace built by the community was released. The IOTA NFT marketplace is a feeless alternative to the expensive and energy-wasting approaches taken by other networks. In the latest dev-update they announced that ISCP is coming to the DevNet with the latest release, which is supposed to be this week. Having feeless NFT's and other digital assets is huge, and even the smart contracts on IOTA can be feeless, although this is optional. Recent progress has been so good that the IOTA Foundation announced that both ISCP and digital assets will be released on the Chrysalis network, no need to wait until Coordicide. This release is likely happening early next year, but no official ETA was given.

Decentralization

When discussing IOTA, the same thing always gets brought up: "but it's not decentralized." This is currently true of course, but only for value transactions. Data transactions are already decentralized. Ironically though, IOTA is one of the few projects in this space that actually aims for true decentralization: there is no leader, and each node is an equal part of the network and can attach its transactions directly to the ledger state. A lot of Coordicide testing has already been done on private test networks, but on June 2nd they released the first fully decentralized public IOTA network without the need of a Coordinator. Several updates and optimizations have already been released since then, and they are getting very close now to becoming feature complete. Once the DevNet is feature complete there will be several months of testing left, but the general consensus is that we will see Coordicide go live somewhere next year. This release would make IOTA the first DLT that is truly decentralized, feeless, fast, scalable, and green, that offers data and value separation.