The IOTA team has been preparing for its token launch on the exchange for two years and now finally the technology is mature enough to go live.
The creators of the IOTA project unveil that since the very launch in 2015 they were bombarded with requests by thousands and thousands of people asking to list IOTA on exchanges. They have been waiting for two years and the great day has finally come. Bitfinex officially announced the IOTA token, IOT. Tradable in IOT/USD and IOT/BTC pairs, tokens for use with the IOTA network are now publicly accessible through the Bitfinex website.
Initially, the price of IOTA token on the CoinMarketCap made up $0.63, later it fell to $0.59.
David Sønstebø, the IOTA founder, admits that although it has always been inspiring to see such enthusiasm and confidence expressed by people, IOTA is first of all an open source project with the primary focus on enabling future applications, security, services, infrastructure, business models, governance structures and beyond.
“When revolutionizing already revolutionizing technology (Blockchain), patience is more than just a virtue, it’s a prerequisite to succeeding”, Sønstebø said.
Once the IOTA tokens were listed on Bitfinex, the transaction volume skyrocketed so that the servers briefly went down. “Moments after the IOTA launch,” Bitfinex representative Brandon Carps shared, “we were all hands on deck to load balance and ensure IOTA trading was back online and operating as expected.”
Remarkably, 4.44 Million Mega IOTA was traded with the IOT/USD pair only for the first three hours of trading. Even greater activity was observed in the IOT/BTC trades – 11.67 Million Mega IOTA was traded for the same time period.
“The first two hours of IOTA trading was more than double the USD volume and ten times greater than the BTC volume of the last token we released, Ripple, over the course of its full trading day”, Carps unveiled.
The IOTA availability on Bitfinex is the first encounter with the project for thousands of people. The team has done a great work to mature the technology so that it could go on exchanges and welcome thousands of new users. There is still much work ahead and IOTA will be optimized within following weeks and months until the core protocol is ready for standardization and prime time deployment in the real world on a large scale. As David Sønstebø points out, “perfection takes time”. And there is nothing to argue with.
The IOTA team sets ambitious goals and it is hard to overestimate the role of exchanges and market in realization of these ambitions. The strengthening of IOTA tokens value and liquidity opens the doors of IOTA to a whole new audience.
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