As the year draws to a close there seems to be no let-up in the furore and mania surrounding cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin may have stabilised to a certain extent, but other currencies such as Ethereum, ZCash, Ripple and Litecoin have soared as critical mass has been established. Crypto conversations in coffeeshops are now commonplace.
Some talk of tulips, others of new reserve currencies and digital gold standards, but the juggernaut continues; nobody knows what will happen in 2018.
What has become clear, however, is that the existing financial ecosystem is not turning a blind eye to the possibilities and disruptions of cryptocurrencies.
The G20 group of nations is watching as well. At the behest of France, the G20 will discuss the ‘bitcoin problem’ at its next potlatch in April, 2018. That may be the time when regulation and decorum finally reach consensus and speculators turn elsewhere for their fast bucks.
Whether it is bitcoin futures or stock market blockchains, a rapport is gradually being reached between centralized and decentralized systems, not least venture capital and how that institution will remain viable.
News comes today that those worlds are fusing together as Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC), the corporate venture capital company of the Bosch Group, has purchased a significant amount of IOTA tokens.
RBVC has made a strategic move in buying these IOTA tokens, one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world. IOTA, which is the first distributed ledger technology to go beyond a blockchain, enables machines to securely transact data and money with each other.
The IOTA Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Germany focused on distributed ledger technology and permissionless ecosystem development.
The news follows the successful launch of IOTA’s data marketplace, with more than 30 participants such as Accenture Labs, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, Orange, Samsung Artik, TINE and many more.
Established in 2015, the IOTA protocol is an open-source distributed ledger protocol for the Internet of Things, enabling scalable and machine-to-machine payments as well as the secure data transfer of sensors.
In doing so, RBVC wants to intensify the collaboration with IOTA and help accelerate the technology to maturity by bringing it closer to Bosch’s global ecosystem and key partners.
RBVC’s investment broadens the potential for new business models for IoT in several verticals and positions IOTA and Bosch as a significant force to take on the challenges of IoT.
The IOTA technology has already enabled more than $10 billion to be transacted and has been utilized for user cases including transparent value chains, secure Over-the-Air updates and 'feeless' micropayment-based electric vehicle charging, parking and more.
“Distributed ledger technology will play an important role in the industry of tomorrow. We are one of the pioneers actively driving the adoption of DLT in the automotive and IoT industry.
"The investment in IOTA’s token, the first ever token investment of RBVC, will help us work closely with the IOTA Foundation to explore the industrialization of this exciting technology," said Dr. Ingo Ramesohl, Managing Director at RBVC.
The IOTA foundation has also announced that Dr. Hongquan Jiang, Partner at RBVC, will join IOTA’s advisory board, an appointment that will further meld the two organisations.
“I’m very excited about IOTA’s technology, which could potentially become the standard underlying technology for trustless machine to machine communication, security and payment in the IoT space.
“There will be much synergy between Bosch and the IOTA Foundation and I’m looking forward to seeing more industrial adoptions of this technology in the near future", said Dr Jiang.
This confederation of a product company, its VC arm IoT and IOTA's distributed ledger technology is an interesting one and appears more than mere speculation... it seems grown-up.
While others in the cryptocurrency world are riding the bandwagon into 2018 until the almost-certain correction later that year, others seem to be playing a more nuanced long-game.
For RBVC and IOTA, this is not just a token deal; it promises to be much more than that.
