Thanks to technological progress, devices for the Internet of Things are constantly getting smaller, cheaper and more energy efficient However, this is accompanied by a flood of data that has to be managed somehow. A potential solution is to provide flexible data processing capacity online, which would require some sort of payment that could be performed automatically by IoT nodes. That’s where new types of cryptocurrencies – such as IOTA – come into play. In this instalment we describe the background aspects, while in the next we present an FPGA based extension board (HAT) for the Raspberry Pi that can accelerate IOTA transactions.