Researchers Build Superfast IOTA-Based File Sharing Platform
IOTA (MIOTA) has been adopted by three researchers at Taiwan’s National Kaohsiung University for the development of a super-fast and highly scalable alternative to BitTorrent called IOTA-BT, according to reports on October 6, 2020.
A Tangle-Based BitTorrent
Li-Yiuan Hou, Tsung-Yi Tang and Tyng-Yeu Liang, three researchers at the electrical engineering department of the National Kaohsiung University in Taiwan, have proven that IOTA’s Tangle technology is highly scalable and faster than regular blockchains by creating an improved version of BitTorrent powered by Tangle.
Per sources close to the matter, the three researchers pointed out in their research paper titled “IOTA-BT: A P2P File-sharing System Based on IOTA” that the popular BiTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing system has some limitations, including a single point of failure, and susceptibility to cyberattacks.
To solve this problem, the researchers integrated the Tangle technology into their own version of BitTorrent dubbed IOTA-BT, which they claim offers higher security, availability and public access.
The Experiment
To test the performance of the IOTA-BT p2p file-sharing system on the public IOTA Tangle, the researchers reportedly set up three IRI nodes in Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, and one IRI node at the university lab, using Google Cloud’s virtual machines.
It turned out that seed files were released within six to eight seconds in the IOTA mainnet, and other clients could also retrieve the details of the seed file within any IOTA mainnet node in less than one second.
The researchers wrote:
“The experiment result shows that IOTA-BT can indeed effectively reduce the number of unnecessary transaction searches and decoding. Finally, the efficiency of IOTA-BT is indeed acceptable for P2P file sharing. IOTA-BT can indeed efficiently provide users with a P2P file sharing environment with increased security.”
Going forward, the researchers say they plan to integrate IOTA 2.0 smart contracts into the file file sharing solution once the IOTA upgrade is complete.
They added:
“We will explore IOTA 2.0 smart contracts to make IOTA-BT evolve into a P2P file trading system in the near future.”
In related news, last May, SOCIETY2 launched an IOTA-powered social network designed to give users control over their privacy and content ownership.
At press time, the price of IOTA (MIOTA) sits at $0.248427, with a market capitalization of $690.51 million, as seen on CoinMarketCap.
