The native token of the IOTA distributed ledger ecosystem, also called IOTA, witnessed a sudden rally following the announcement of the new IOTA Foundation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
IOTA is up 35% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $0.236 at the time of writing. The asset hit a 10-month high of $0.285 shortly after the big announcement. IOTA’s market capitalization currently stands at around $720 million with a daily trading volume of $773 million.
Despite the recent rally, IOTA is still 95% below its all-time high of $5.69 on December 20, 2017.
On November 29, IOTA announced the launch of the $100 million distributed ledger technology (DLT) foundation regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market, called the IOTA foundation.
According to the announcement, the new foundation will be based in Abu Dhabi and the company will invest $100 million in IOTA tokens in its seed round. The assets will be granted for four years with the main objective of building the IOTA ecosystem.
According to data provided by market intelligence platform Santiment, the recent announcement has caused a massive boost to IOTA social activity. The social volume of the asset experienced a rebound of 1,745% in the last 24 hours, according to data from Santiment.
Furthermore, IOTA’s total open interest (OI) has been rising steadily since November 21. According to Santiment, IOTA’s total OI increased from $8.7 million on November 27 to $8.8 million a day later. However, there is no real-time data showing the exact OI of the token.
At the end of January this year, the European Union selected IOTA for the European Blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement to test blockchain technology.
