Internet of Things project, IOTA, announced at 07:57 CET on 29th January that a node milestone has been reached, of 2000 Nelson/Bolero nodes. This relates to a type of network infrastructure which, as opposed to Vitalik Butarin\'s Blockchain, is designed in a \"tangle.\" The original concept was pioneered in an August 2017 white paper by coder Serguei Popov, but the Nelson/Bolero algorithms are attributable to core developer Roman Semko.

IOTA is still a decentralised distributed ledger, but it has an additional, open-source protocol which claims to go \"beyond blockchain.\" Its core invention is a modular, blockless Tangle, which has no scaling limitations and is not subject to transaction fees. IOTA’s Tangle network is described as a \"quantum-resistant Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG),\" which, in layman\'s terms, is a tree which only grows upwards. The branches of the tree grow with transaction activity, rather than coin mining or proving stake, and do not form a cycle or become centralised.

The infrastructure developments pioneered by Semko comprise two forms of Node in the Tangle. IOTA users download a database and an IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier), with a protective Node layer to protect the core Node against assault by phishers and hackers. The new gatekeeper layers are part of the CarrIOTA system developed by Semko, which is essentially a wallet manager for multiple wallets.