Originating from Norway, IOTA became a global not-for-profit foundation incorporated and headquartered in Germany. The IOTA Foundation's mission is to support the research and development of new distributed ledger technologies (DLT), including the IOTA Tangle. The Foundation encourages the education and adoption of distributed ledger technologies through the creation of ecosystems and the standardization of these new protocols.The IOTA Tangle is a DLT designed for the Internet of Things and applications across all smart industries including energy, mobility, smart cities, industrial IoT, smart supply chain and more.

In Norway, IOTA fosters an education, research and innovation ecosystem and provides support to a number of initiatives including peer-to-peer energy trading and mobility-as-a service solution development and testbed piloting such as cityxchange.eu in collaboration with City of Trondheim, NTNU, POWEL etc