IOTA went live with its Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ten days ago and expected it to generate a great deal of momentum. However, the first interim results are sobering: the IOTA EVM is finding few users and little capital.
Long faces at IOTA: the launch of the EVM ten days ago was supposed to open a new chapter and allow IOTA to expand in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi). Foundation head Dominik Schiener even dreams of bringing IOTA back into the top ten cryptocurrencies worldwide with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. In reality, however, IOTA’s price curve has fallen by around 10% since the launch of the EVM and has also fallen below the psychologically important USD 0.20 mark again, 96% away from previous all-time highs of over USD 5.
The tragedy of the IOTA EVM can be documented with blockchain data. On the one hand, DeFiLlama is the established point of contact for meaningful results for the TVL indicator, which measures the DeFi capital invested in ecosystems. The IOTA EVM is currently listed at around USD 170,000, which is not even enough to place it among the 100 EVMs with the most capital.
However, the IOTA EVM Explorer, which records activity, must also be more than impressive. According to this, just over 100 users of the IOTA EVM are active every day and the number of new registrations per day is in the low double-digit range. In short: despite months of preparatory work and advertising for the IOTA EVM, it has not yet found an audience and certainly no DeFi users who would shift their crypto money.
For critics, this false start of the IOTA EVM is no surprise. The side project Shimmer (SMR) launched an EVM in the fall of 2023 and suffered a debacle despite a major advertising campaign. In absolute figures, however, the Shimmer EVM is still ahead of IOTA, which optimists such as Schiener believed had completely different potential given its popularity and theoretical market capitalization.
Conclusion: IOTA’s decline not halted by EVM
Late in 2023, IOTA CEO Dominik Schiener celebrated a new branch of the foundation in Abu Dhabi and spread a spirit of optimism with the prospect of the EVM. The old problems remain: The inflation hammer at IOTA, which was pushed through in a coup d’état, is exerting constant pressure on the price curve, timetables such as those for the EVM are regularly delayed and the project is hardly taken seriously in the crypto scene, partly due to the lack of decentralization (keyword Coordicide). There are no signs that the rudder can now be turned around with the help of the IOTA EVM – on the contrary: the Ethereum Virtual Machine at IOTA makes it clear how a once very successful cryptocurrency is disappearing further and further into insignificance.
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