Email Leak Conspiracies And Hacks Bring IOTA Market To Knees

Since last year, IOTA cryptocurrency has gone through some serious issues as the official emails between IOTA team and DCI got leaked where the latter found vulnerabilities in former’s system. Additionally, a $4million hack further affected IOTA market reputation that subsequently brought its prices down.

Is IOTA cryptocurrency getting lost?

IOTA market is going through a not-so-good phase what with all the email leaks, conspiracies, and hacks. It came into the market with a lot of hype around its name and boasted of being a groundbreaking open source distributed ledger that does not belong to the blockchain. Focused on the Internet of Things (IoT), it uses a quantum proof protocol called Tangle that offers fast transactions, zero fees, secure data transfer, and infinite scalability.

There seems to be a lot of promises, however, we have yet to see a substantial real-world usage of this technology, unlike Blockchain which is currently in use on a wide scale.

IOTA market: Tangle gets tangled up in vulnerabilities!

In 2017, the team of IOTA reached out to an MIT affiliated research group, Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) to test the Tangle for any vulnerabilities. The group stated that they have been successful in executing an attack against their system:

“We have found serious cryptographic weaknesses in the cryptographic hash function Curl used by IOTA, Curl. These weaknesses threaten the security of signatures and PoW in IOTA as PoW and Signatures rely on Curl to be pseudo-random and collision resistant.”

This 124-page email conversation between DIC and IOTA was leaked that debates over the alleged vulnerability in IOTA’s system. However, later IOTA announced on its official medium page that there is no actual vulnerability in its protocol per se as those protocols were in place as a copy-protection mechanism.

Then, struck with a $4 million hack!

IOTA has apparently worked on their vulnerability, though it didn’t stop the hackers from stealing from them. Back in January, this year, IOTA also suffered a phishing attack and lost about $4million worth of IOTA cryptocurrency. The hacker used the private keys of the IOTA wallets to steal users’ money form their accounts.

The website iotaseed.io was created by the hacker in August that the hacker linked to GitHub repository and advertised it as online IOTA seed generator. At the same time, the DDoS attack took place that kept the developers of IOTA busy, though the team denies any correlation between the two.

Now, the IOTA Price Drops…

Based on Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) concept, IOTA has its competitors in Byteball and Hashgraph that follows the similar concept that charges the transaction fees. IOTA’s competitors certainly have far superior features especially Byteball that is far more efficient for crypto operations and to be used in the real world which seems to be underpriced as well.

Though no vulnerability has been found in IOTA’s system, the email leak “conspiracy” and the hack has certainly put a damper on the popularity as well as the credibility of IOTA cryptocurrency. This effect can also be seen in its prices as it is currently riding on $1.88. It won’t be surprising if the prices fall even further unless the IOTA team comes up with something substantial to offer its users.

What are your views on IOTA cryptocurrency reliability in the market and how IOTA price will be affected in the near future? Let us know below!

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Achal Arya

Achal Arya is a digital product designer and an entrepreneur. He did his masters degree in design from IIT Hyderabad and has a bachelors degree in Computer Science. He works in the Web3 domain and manages new developments at CoinGape. Follow him on X at @arya_achal or reach him at achal[at]coingape.com.

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