IOTA team clarifies: no official partnership with Microsoft, despite ambiguous announcement in late November.
The IOTA team clarified this week that it has no formal partnership with Microsoft, following the wide misinterpretation of a quote from Microsoft on IOTA’s official blog included in an announcement about IOTA’s Data Marketplace. The quote from Microsoft seemed to indicate an official partnership between the two companies and investors reacted to the news accordingly.
The exact quote from Microsoft Blockchain specialist, Omkar Naik, reads:
“We are excited to partner with the IOTA Foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative.”
In an email interview IOTA co-founder, Dominik Schiener, defended his company’s role in the misunderstanding noting that they included Microsoft in a list of Marketplace ‘participants’:
“We have never mentioned that any of the companies which are participating in the marketplace are our ‘partners’. We call them participants”.
When asked for clarification about the nature of their involvement in IOTA’s Data Marketplace, a Microsoft representative explained that “IOTA is a Microsoft Azure customer and plans to use Azure to test and deploy its Data Marketplace.”
However, despite the absence of an official agreement, the two companies are indeed working together on several technology exercises involving IOTA’s Tangle network. The experiments include installing and connecting weather sensors to IOTA’s ledger technology.
Other IOTA developments
IOTA’s market share has increased more than fourfold, growing to over $13 bln from $2.95 bln following the announcement of its Data Marketplace.
Meanwhile, Schiener announced that the startup is also scheduled to conduct similar experiments with a number of companies other than Microsoft, and will publish the initial results soon:
“We have already begun holding activities with several of the companies listed and will soon publish the first results… The launch of the data marketplace was just the beginning. This project will continue for several weeks and is multi-staged.”
