Abu Dhabi’s strategic location and progressive regulatory environment make it an ideal base for IOTA’s operations, especially across the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and in Africa and Asia.
IOTA is thrilled to announce a significant milestone in our journey towards establishing IOTA as a global, digital infrastructure and innovation ecosystem. We are proud to reveal our plans to establish a new independent, regulated foundation to be headquartered in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This move underlines their commitment to the UAE and their ambitions to grow IOTA’s reach and importance around the globe.
The purpose of this entity is to become one of the primary organizations to foster the growth, adoption, and global expansion of IOTA. As we open up a new chapter with IOTA, we need to match technology with the right support to establish IOTA as a global ecosystem. We can only do this by operating out of the right environment. We are convinced that the UAE will offer IOTA the best environment to realize its global ambitions.
Establishing an additional headquarters for IOTA is a step to further decentralize the governance of IOTA. IOTA will only succeed if it is a globally distributed, open, permission less, and impartial digital infrastructure. We want IOTA to be a public goods infrastructure that will power our digital society and economy. With the new foundation in Abu Dhabi, it will help the foundation achieve its vision of the future.
According to Dominik Schiener, Chairman of the IOTA Foundation, “From the very beginning, we have experienced a very warm welcome and unwavering support from leaders, regulators, and businesses in Abu Dhabi. I am simply amazed at how the country operates and how it is being led by visionary and open-minded leaders. This “can-do” mentality is the perfect environment for us to take IOTA to the next level. We are excited to play a role in helping to establish the UAE as a hub for technology innovations.”
Establishing the new entity’s headquarters in Abu Dhabi gives the IOTA Foundation a central hub for overseeing the growth and expansion of IOTA on a global scale. The newly established foundation will operate under the guidance of its founder and a dedicated board of directors. One of its primary objectives will be to provide essential funding and support to the rapidly-growing IOTA ecosystem. This commitment is in alignment with its mission to foster innovation and development within the broader DLT space.
It will focus on maximizing the utility, scalability, and economic activity of the IOTA network and the $IOTA token, with Shimmer positioned as a complementary staging network to validate and expedite the technical roadmap of IOTA. After the launch of IOTA 2.0, they will introduce programmability on the IOTA Layer 1 (L1) by integrating general-purpose smart contracts. This will help to maximize the utility of the $IOTA token by increasing the demand for Mana and it will align L2 networks with the IOTA L1 through shared security.
They will soon introduce a new Ecosystem Fund that will help further decentralize the governance of IOTA and support ecosystem growth. Several community governance vehicles, committees, and entities will be set up to empower the community to help manage the ecosystem fund. This Ecosystem Fund will be funded through a temporary token inflation that will last for four years, increasing the total supply to 4.6 billion IOTA tokens.
