Tangle Distributed Ledger

Abstract

Tangle is a relatively recent distributed ledger technology (DLT), which is specially designed for IoT (Internet of Things) applications. The blockchain technology which is used for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, relies upon the concept of rewarding the mining node whose newly created block is appended to the chain of blocks. This concept is not feasible in the realm of IoT technology. This is true because: If the Bitcoin blockchain technology is used, then the required transaction fees may turn out to be higher than the value of the IoT transaction itself. IoT networks require higher transaction processing rate than cryptocurrencies. Recall from the chapter on blockchain-throughput of this Volume (Volume 2: Engineering Principles), that the blockchains which support Bitcoin-like applications have a very low transaction processing rate. Further, nodes in the IoT network may or may not have high computational power.