IOTA is the missing puzzle piece for the Machine Economy to fully emerge and reach its desired potential. We envision IOTA to be the public, permissionless backbone for the Internet of Things that enables true interoperability between all devices.

IOTA has a range of features that are uniquely enabled due to its architecture:

- Scalability: IOTA can achieve high transaction throughput thanks to parallelized validation of transactions with no limit as to the number of transactions that can be confirmed in a certain interval
- No Transaction Fees: IOTA has no transaction fees.
- Decentralization: IOTA has no miners. Every participant in the network that is making a transaction, actively participates in the consensus. As such, IOTA is more decentralized than any Blockchain.
- Quantum-immunity: IOTA utilized a newly designed trinary hash function called Curl, which is quantum immune (Winternitz signatures)

According to consultancy firm Bain, the IoT market is expected to be worth $470 billion by 2020. Through IOTA Foundation, the German nonprofit behind the cryptocurrency, IOTA is an early mover in this space. It has already partnered with companies which will play a leading role in IoT, such as Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) and Samsung Electronics Ltd. (SSNLF), to create a data marketplace that can be monetized later. IOTA has also partnered with Innogy, an energy company.