Iota is a brand new and novel micro-transaction cryptotoken optimized for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Unlike the complex and heavy blockchains of Bitcoin and the like, which were designed with other uses in mind, Iota is created to be as lightweight as possible, hence the name "Iota" with emphasis on the ‘IoT’ part.
The number of connected devices that will permeate our modern landscape in the coming decade is estimated to be 50 billion(!) Each of these are designed to make the world a better and more seamless place for us. Tied to this fantastic promise are of course a ton of obstacles to be overcome, of which one major one is micro-transactions. These connected IoT devices must be able to automatically pay miniscule amounts to one another in a frictionless manner without having to compromise on product design by introducing additional hardware. This is why Iota was conceived.
While it was developed as a solution to scalability issues faced in IoT, the underlying protocol is agnostic and can be applied in any other use-cases that utilize micro-transactions.
In order to achieve these audacious goals Iota’s design diverged radically from blockchain cryptocurrencies. It still retains the core principle ideas of the distributed consensus blockchain, but in order to be able to scale to the size of the coming Internet-of-Things ecosystem with tens of billions of devices that are connected to each other, it needed to be very lightweight and efficient. This problem is solved by Iota’s core innovation: the tangle.