The IOTA Foundation has decided that decentralization will become a reality in 2024, starting with the side project Shimmer (SMR). Subsequently, IOTA 2.0 is to go live and with it a completely new Tanglenet.
The IOTA Foundation is running a massive information campaign to present the planned technological innovations. An official summary now also includes a timeline for IOTA 2.0: A testnet is to go live in the first quarter of 2024 and the new protocol will then be imported to the Shimmer side project (SMR). Later next year, according to the announcement, IOTA itself will undergo the major upgrade to version 2.0, which will finally decentralize the tanglenet.
IOTA 2.0, also known as “Coordicide”, has been haunting the crypto scene since the early days of block-builders.de; we first reported on it here in 2018. Since then, the IOTA Foundation has promised every year that decentralization is within reach – but little has happened. A committee recently set up to replace the central coordinator in the IOTA Tanglenet turned out to be a sham on closer inspection. The technological structure of IOTA has always been dominated by a central authority, which contradicts the decentralized principle of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC).
Now, however, the IOTA Foundation once again believes that it will be able to solve this fundamental problem in the foreseeable future. As far as is known, a type of Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) will decide on the validation of transactions in IOTA 2.0 in future. DPoS has become increasingly popular as a crypto protocol in recent years and is used by Ethereum (ETH), among others.
Several dozen official blog articles, videos and other contributions have been published online for IOTA 2.0 since October. The community has largely commented positively on the announcements and is hoping for positive impetus for the price curves of Shimmer and IOTA.
Conclusion: IOTA and Shimmer on the brink of a fundamental revolution in 2024?
The crypto markets are not infected by the major IOTA announcements. Shimmer is trading at around USD 0.037, close to an all-time low, and the brief flurry of interest in SMR in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector is already on the decline again. In the case of IOTA, the registration of a new foundation in Abu Dhabi at the end of November led to a temporary price spike, but this has already been cashed in again. Whether the crypto industry is still waiting for a decentralized IOTA 2.0 is the big question, alongside technological feasibility, to which there may be answers in 2024.
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