According to Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chairman of IOTA, the global technology network IOTA created a foundation in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday to accelerate the expansion of its distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the Middle East. The foundation’s objective is to assist in converting assets from the physical world into digital ones.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is comparable to blockchain, a cryptographic technology that has been around for more than ten years and has already realized hundreds of possible applications. Investing will be funded through the use of IOTA digital tokens.
The foundation provides additional support to a sector that has recently suffered from the failure of essential market participants like FTX and the fall from grace of Binance, which was once the biggest cryptocurrency exchange. On the other hand, there is a growing sense of optimism around the anticipation that exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that invest in spot bitcoin will soon receive regulatory clearance.
IOTA Ecosystem DLT Foundation is the first organization focusing on blockchain technology to receive approval from the authorities of the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the financial capital of the United Arab Emirates. These laws regarding blockchain technology were completed at the beginning of November.
“The market right now is being reshuffled, so we have a big opportunity to position ourselves by focusing on onboarding institutions and offering them to work on-chain because now it’s more feasible to do that in the UAE,” Schiener stated during a telephone interview.
Schiener stated that the foundation will be seeded with over one hundred million dollars worth of IOTA tokens, which will be vested after four years.
As of Tuesday, the market value of IOTA tokens was over $524 million, and they were trading at approximately $0.17 per token, according to Coinmarketcap.com. According to Schiener, the cash will be utilized to foster the IOTA network’s development and speed up its expansion.
According to him, IOTA will also begin “tokenizing” assets, a method in which ownership rights in property or buildings are represented as digital tokens and kept on a blockchain. Tokens can be considered digital counterparts to ownership certificates in virtually any material possession.
Hamad Sayah Al Mazrouei, the chief executive of the Registration Authority of ADGM, said that Abu Dhabi is attempting to establish itself as “the leading jurisdiction for the blockchain industry” by inviting IOTA to the country.
IOTA has experienced one of the fastest growth rates since its launch in 2015; however, regulatory ambiguity is hampering its European initiatives. The company has a base in Germany and is now working on blockchain initiatives with representatives from European government agencies.
