Short answers, pulled from the story.
IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger and cryptocurrency designed for the Internet of things. It uses a directed acyclic graph called the Tangle instead of a blockchain, letting devices exchange data and value without transaction fees.
IOTA was created in 2015 by David Sønstebø, Dominik Schiener, Sergey Ivancheglo, and Serguei Popov. Development was funded through an online crowdsale that raised approximately 1,300 BTC, worth around US$500,000 at the time, and the network went live in 2016.
IOTA currently relies on a node called the coordinator, operated by the IOTA Foundation, to validate transactions by issuing periodic milestones. Because the coordinator is a single point of failure, critics such as Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-Wee argue the network is not truly decentralized.
In January 2018, more than US$10 million worth of IOTA tokens were stolen from users who had used a malicious online seed-creator tool, affecting more than 85 victims. It was the largest fraud in IOTA's history, and UK and German law enforcement arrested a 36-year-old man from Oxford, England in January 2019.
Chrysalis, also known as IOTA 1.5, is a network update that launched on the 28th of April 2021. It removed earlier, controversial design choices, including ternary encoding and Winternitz one-time signatures, replacing them with established technical standards.
Coordicide, or IOTA 2.0, is the planned follow-up update meant to remove the coordinator node from the consensus process entirely. A testnet for Coordicide was deployed in late 2020, with the IOTA Foundation aiming to release a final version in 2021.