Advanced data management on Distributed Ledgers: design and implementation of a Telegram BOT as a front end for a IOTA cryptocurrency wallet.

Considering the data-centrality vision of our modern economy, it is natural to think whether or not it is possible to use a Distributed Ledger structure for the storage of general purpose data (or sensitive encrypted data) and not only financial transaction data.For my thesis I have chosen to study and analyze IOTA, a DLT created specifically for the IoT and focused on the data granularity. IOTA is called "a Blockchain without Block and without Chain" because it promises the same advantages of a Blockchain using, however, a different structure called Tangle.The tangle is basically a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) where, instead of building a chain of blocks added at specific intervals, transactions are sent directly, and each one becomes a node of the graph. In IOTA there are no transaction fees. As the Tangle grows and more users make transactions, the whole system becomes faster, more robust and more secure.The goal of my thesis was to understand and analyze data storage based on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). After a little period studying the Blockchain architecture I focused on IOTA. Nowadays the way to store and secure large amounts of sensitive data is moving from the classical database to DLTs, where security, availability and consistency are essential. The future is seen as a set of devices that save data and interface through the web to store and exchange information with each other: this is the IoT vision, where many features and scenarios become possible: machine economy, digital twin, faster transactions and all of this in a scalable environment. These goals can be reached in a more feasible way using DLTs.The main innovation behind IOTA is the Tangle, a revolutionary new blockless distributed ledger which is scalable, lightweight and for the first time ever makes it possible to perform a transaction, in which any kind of data can be stored without any fees. Differently from the Blockchain paradigm, in IOTA consensus is no-longer delegated to a sub-community of users (the miners) but is instead reached through the active contribution of all users (therefore becoming an intrinsic part of the system), leading to a real decentralized and self-regulating peer-to-peer network.I started by studying the theory behind the IOTA architecture and the Tangle structure understanding the theoretical principles described in the IOTA whitepaper.Then I have studied how to start and maintain a full-node (IOTA application to retrieve and synchronize data on the Tangle) manually-managed using the IOTA Reference Implementation (IRI). I set up and managed 3 full-nodes fully synchronized, installed at ISMB.As an IOTA developer, I learned how to use the dedicated client libraries (JAVA, iota.lib.js) in order to interact with the Tangle.As my Master's Degree Thesis project I developed a Telegram Bot managing an IOTA wallet for each user. This bot permits to send and receive IOTA tokens easily from inside a chat. I decided to develop my project using the IOTA Javascript library to exploit all the potential of nodeJS and npm packets manager.