While Schiener discussed that the total beta of the identity covenant will be unveiled soon, he also gave a hint that IOTA is getting ready to roll out a vaccination passport that is being talked with the US associates and also government circles.
“Our identity protocol is getting very very close to getting a full beta release. And the vaccinations passport is one of the – I would say -sub-projects that we are currently working on, and we are very much engaging with US counterparts there, including the government. So I think over the next few weeks, we’ll see how and which role IOTA can play in the vaccination passport for some of these countries.”
With respect to adoption by large enterprises “with thousands of employees,” Schiener pointed out that these enterprises have “clear processes on how things work”. Furthermore, they frequently have divisions dedicated for innovations and trials on latest technologies. Schiener further stated that IOTA is “still in this experimentation phase. But the focus is by being production-ready that these products are enabled.”
He further stressed that creating associations with large enterprises is a prolonged process:
“Now, when it comes to big companies, the innovation cycle is not like in crypto where daily things are changing. Corporations are used to year long product cycles. […] Usually from a first contact to an NDA, a Non Disclosure Agreement, it’s about six months, sometimes it can be faster.”
Furthermore, the co-founder of IOTA underlined that the network has amended its enterprise adoption plan in 2020 to center around a handful of large enterprises to achieve the objective:
“But relationship building takes time and last year we made the decision to not longer focus on high level adoption but really go deep with corporate partners and do it with a few companies that we really know, believe in IOTA and where we really think that these pilot cases can help us to further increase the awareness and adoption of IOTA. That’s why we really focus very closely on cooperations with Dell, that’s why we work really close with Zebra, with a bunch of others that haven’t been announced yet.”
Schiener, speaking further regarding the plans of IOTA Foundtion to draw big enterprises into the ecosystem as “infrastructure partners,” stated:
“I think they way it’s going to work out is that one or two big companies announce that they have required IOTA tokens, and that is going to cause a Ripple effect where other companies start to realize, first of all, this makes total sense, acquiring IOTA tokens, having it as a utility for your use case and also having it as an investment for hatch yourself against inflation and also being part of this machine economy.”