• IOTA has announced a partnership with ALYX to help in tracking products
• They are also in talks to begin offering services to institutional investors

If there is any project that has stayed on its toes consistently, it is IOTA, as the foundation is constantly pushing its boundaries and expanding the use of its tangle technology in fields such as supply chain management, apparel, and even the automobile sector. Needless to say, it is one of the companies that are most interesting to watch and their products are constantly making headlines.

In the last weeks, they have announced two major new projects; the collaboration with ALYX as well as their talks being held with institutional investors, which is one of the most robust aspects of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Institutional money

Institutional money has been significantly growing in the crypto industry for the last year and the industry is maturing significantly and is seen as the next phase in order to push mainstream adoption. As such, large firms such as  JP Morgan and Facebook are investing heavily in cryptocurrency.

Not looking to get left behind, IOTA announced on May 14 that they have started to engage in talks with regulated customer service providers as well as the custody partners to provide custodian services to institutional investors.

Preparing for adoption

The industry has courted institutional investment for a good amount of time and it is encouraging that these efforts are paying off.  However, because cryptocurrency is a newer industry, those who are bringing in institutional funds are a bit cautious with their investments and as a result,  crypto-related films are offering a wide range of services such as custodian services, insurance for crypto holdings and so on.

The foundation has explained that attention will be given to the security of digital holdings in order to help institutions make use of the MIOTA token without issues. They also emphasized that deregulated mechanisms need to be created to help store and exchange MIOTA tokens.

This makes sense considering the many organizations that IOTA has collaborated with in the last few months such as Jaguar, in an arrangement that will reward drivers with MIOTA tokens for sharing information with the ecosystem.

As a result of that, MIOTA  is used more frequently on many more platforms and so they need to be tracked stored effectively to benefit current users and to attract new ones.

Even as IOTA grows from strength to strength, it will be interesting to see what else they come up with and what more interesting contributions will make both to the IOTA eco-system and to cryptocurrency as a whole.

IOTA and ALYX

One of the more interesting applications of crypto is in the apparel and fashion industry for the purpose of tracking the product and ensuring the authenticity of the goods. This is simply an offshoot of the application of blockchain in the supply chain industry in order to combat counterfeiting theft and so on. LVMH announced a few weeks ago that they would be making use of blockchain in a test run to ensure the authenticity of the goods being sold under their various labels.

Now ALYX, a luxury fashion brand, has announced it will make use of this technology for supply chain tracking, as reported on May 15, 2019.

Fashion on the tangle

This new system is going to be used by the fashion brand as a partnership with Avery Dennison which will allow those who purchase ALYX goods to have insight into how the supply chain works as a means of inspiring consumer confidence in just what product they are buying. This will be done by the scanning of QR codes on an app and by doing so, the customer can tell the lifecycle of the product from where it was created to its final point-of-sale.

All the product information associated with each item is stored on the IOTA tangle and users will be able to use them whenever they want. This will also benefit the firms who want to keep track of their product information.

“Brands and consumers can know that the information they are being shown about the garment’s creation process is 100% accurate and can be trusted implicitly,” said Debbie Shakespeare, senior director of sustainability and compliance at Avery Dennison.

Future of fashion

As the rest of the world evolves, so does the fashion industry and there is a lot more emphasis on things such as sustainable fashion and as such, many consumers want to be sure that the product they are buying is made from sustainable materials and under ethical conditions.

While brands often claim that their materials are sourced ethically and their products under ethical conditions, they have been caught lying about this in the past. By using blockchain – or in this case, the tangle, customers can be assured that they are purchasing products that are compatible with their ethical values and companies can, in turn, earn their trust.

A number of pilots have been launched with this concept in mind but this is one of the first proof cases that is being used on a large scale.