Right now IOTA works as a content storage and distribution "database" regarding to what we are building, so it's more simple than Ethereum smart contracts and their own language. The API SDK's are all there and are working great for us!
To check the data authenticity it's connecting to a node server for the data synchronisation, the data encryption happens on the client side. Client side nodes are on IOTAs roadmap as it's a technical challenge to synchronise with the network by just storing a small chunk of it.
