At IOTA, the Stardust upgrade will be activated tomorrow, Wednesday morning. In the process, the network will be offline for up to four hours. IOTA Stardust also has significant consequences for investors. We explain the most important details.
IOTA will experience one of the largest upgrades in its history tomorrow (October 4). At 08:00 German time, the import of IOTA Stardust will begin, the foundation announces via X (formerly Twitter). A blog post on Stardust says up to four hours are estimated for the work, during which the network will be deactivated. Originally, the IOTA foundation wanted Stardust to go live as early as September 29.
With the upgrade comes a highly controversial 65 percent increase in the total holdings of all IOTA tokens. This “inflation hammer” now ensures that with Stardust, 180 million IOTA will also be immediately eligible for resale. Over the next two years, additional tranches of the “new” IOTA will be distributed on a bi-weekly basis. The majority of these tokens will go to the IOTA Foundation and its branches in Switzerland and Abu Dhabi. This is to ensure funding for the foundation’s work. Investors, however, must expect noticeable price pressure to come from these “reprinted” IOTAs.
Strictly speaking, the upgrade is also a hard fork, which leaves behind two networks, on the one hand IOTA Stardust and on the other a “Classical Version”, in which the miraculous token multiplication does not take effect. However, the foundation also does not know anything about external support of IOTA Stardust Classic so far, so that loss of significance can be expected here quickly.
IOTA Stardust goes live – Firefly Wallet needs update.
The foundation reminds that with Stardust, the use of a new version of the official IOTA wallet Firefly also becomes necessary. This should be available for download after the upgrade. Firefly 2.0 is supposed to organize the conversion of “old” IOTA” to the new network and also the distribution of new tokens, which will be given via airdrop to those investors who participated in the staking of the now-defunct side project Assembly (ASMB).
Strengthened decentralization at IOTA through upgrade Stardust?
Back in mid-September, the IOTA Foundation announced the replacement of the previous central coordinator with a ten-member committee. This step is intended to put IOTA on a more decentralized basis than before. What is striking: To date, there is no information from the IOTA Foundation about who exactly will participate in this committee. Skeptics therefore fear that the committee could also be a sham in which the foundation once again retains the final say in the validation of transactions through several servers.
Conclusion: IOTA Stardust should prove its future viability
In terms of content, probably the most interesting component of Upgrade Stardust is the associated linking of IOTA with the side projects Shimmer (SMR), where the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) was integrated last week. There could be effects here for lines of business such as Decentralized Finance (DeFi). So far, however, the price curves of IOTA and Shimmer have shown little movement, and the markets are not being infected by the foundation’s demonstrative optimism. So for the time being, it remains to be seen whether everything will run smoothly technically with the IOTA Stardust upgrade tomorrow.
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