When it comes to choosing to invest in either IOTA or Streamr, an important consideration is the scope of each project. Many projects fail when scope creep occurs, which is when the direction of a project shifts or requirements snowball over time. When looking at both projects, it’s clear that IOTA’s team is taking on significantly more than Streamr’s team. The largest task for IOTA’s team is the creation of Tangle, a new transaction process, from scratch. The amount of brainstorming, development, and testing is enormous; and any error will shake confidence in the security of the product. Unfortunately, on July 14th, 2017, a team of researchers at MIT’s Media Lab found glaring red flags in the which took three weeks to fix, which means the $2B IOTA cryptocurrency had a three-week window where users could steal funds from others – a cripplingly long time window for such a large issue. To this day, there are still cryptocurrency experts are staying away from IOTA due to the severity of past bugs and trust issues with the team.
Streamr, on the other hand, is building on the tried-and-true code of Ethereum. In order to overcome the limitations associated with transaction throughput, Streamr is utilizing Ethereum as a means of purely exchanging contracts and not data. Instead, all data transactions occur off the blockchain by utilizing the Streamr’s proprietary data processing engine. By leveraging the verification process of Ethereum, the development team of Streamr can instead focus the majority of their attention on the off-blockchain parts of their technology, which include the processing engine, application development platform, and making key business deals. As the core of the transaction model is rock solid, it allows the team to focus entirely on their off-blockchain portions of their product. Ultimately, this will mean Streamr’s development process will become much more nimble than IOTA’s, as they are not bogged down by extensive testing associated with the transaction process.