The IOTA Foundation has partnered with the Eclipse Foundation, an Ottawa-based open-source software foundation that supports innovation and collaboration, to launch the ‘Tangle EE Working Group’, an organization that will unite “companies and academics in developing IOTA-based data and payment solutions for commercial use.”
According to an official announcement that was shared with Finance Magnates, the working group includes Dell Technologies, STMicroelectronics, and 14 other member organizations: Software AG, Object Management Group, accessec, Energinet, BiiLabs, Calypso Network Association, ENGIE Lab CRIGEN, RWTH Aachen University, Industrial Internet Consortium, AKITA and IoTIFY, Geometric Energy Corporation, TMForum, and lastly, Jinn Labs, which was co-founded by IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø.
Working towards enterprise adoption
“As an open-source project, we realize the importance of increasing access to IOTA’s technology,” said Sønstebø in the announcement. “This is a significant step forward for the IOTA Foundation and our ecosystem to develop a diverse, global community of contributors and adopters collaborating on production-ready commercial applications.”
The group will be used to form “several task forces”, the first of which will explore decentralized marketplaces, and the second of which will investigate decentralized identity applications.
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that his organization “will provide a vendor-neutral governance framework for open collaboration, with IOTA’s scalable, feeless, and permissionless DLT as a base.”
“By doing so, we will accelerate the development of new applications built with this transformative technology,” he added.
“This will elevate IOTA to production-readiness.”
Dominik Schiener, another of the organization's co-founders, sees Eclipse’s tools for governance as critical to the success of the working group: “as IOTA's technologies continue to be adopted in commercial use cases, this transparent and open governance framework will be essential in regulating code development, ensuring market fit, and fulfilling our promises of openness, interoperability, and sustainability,” he remarked.
“This will elevate IOTA to production-readiness.”
The announcement comes shortly after the release of Version 0.1.0 of IOTA’s Coordicide alphanet, which the organization said: “marks an important step forward towards reaching a coordinator-free IOTA Mainnet .” Around the time of the release, an IOTA co-founder who has left the organization accused David Sønstebø of embezzlement; however, the accusations appear to have been dropped as part of the resolution of a personal dispute.
