On IOTA as a potential enabler for an M2M economy in manufacturing

Abstract

Recently, the manufacturing industry became aware of distributed ledger technologies, a protocol that, amongst other things, allows trustless transactions between machines. In this paper, we investigate whether an M2M economy would be feasible within the IOTA network, a popular cryptocurrency for IoT. We build and present a simple industrial lot-size one production system involving three agents that cooperate to create an artistic painting. Payments between agents and users are autonomously executed via IOTA. Amongst other points of criticism, we found that an M2M economy would benefit from the support of smart-contracts and conclude that IOTA is not a fitting solution.