IOTA, named after the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, was created in 2015 by David Sønstebø, Dominik Schiener, Sergey Ivancheglo, and Serguei Popov. Initial development was funded by an online public crowdsale, with the participants buying the IOTA value token with other digital currencies. Approximately 1300BTC were raised, corresponding to approximately US$500,000 at that time, and the total token supply was distributed pro-rata over the initial investors. The IOTA network went live in 2016.

IOTA foundation