IOTA is a distributed ledger that rellies on spread validation of transactions instead of blocks. Instead of having miners confirming blocks of transactions, each participant issuing a transaction must approve 2 past transactions. Thus consensus is reached by destributed, active users. This data structure, based on Directed Acyclic Graph forms the ledger dubbed “Tangle”. As described in detail in Serguei Popov’s white paper.
This allows IOTA to claim as features:
- “Scalability: IOTA can achieve high transaction throughput thanks to parallelized validation of transactions with no limit as to the number of transactions that can be confirmed in a certain interval
- No Transaction Fees: IOTA has no transaction fees.
- Decentralization: IOTA has no miners. Every participant in the network that is making a transaction, actively participates in the consensus. As such, IOTA is more decentralized than any Blockchain.
- Quantum-immunity: IOTA utilized a newly designed trinary hash function called Curl, which is quantum immune (Winternitz signatures)”