IOTA

IOTA began in 2015 around a DAG called the Tangle and a promise of transfers without miners or per-transaction fees. That identity survived several incompatible ledgers. Chrysalis in April 2021 moved users to an EdDSA and UTXO layout; access depended on migration tools and keys, not merely a familiar ticker.

Stardust arrived on 4 October 2023 with native assets and a controversial supply fork. The supported branch set total supply at 4,600,000,000 IOTA to fund ecosystem programs and an Assembly-to-IOTA allocation. IOTA Classic retained the old supply but did not receive continuing Foundation tooling.

This history matters because 'IOTA' names the supported social and software lineage as well as a token balance. Forks can reproduce balances, while exchanges, wallets, developers and validators decide which state remains economically usable.

In December 2024, 98.37% of votes cast backed Rebased. Participation was 7.52%. The vote supplied a strong mandate among participants, not proof that 98.37% of all eligible IOTA approved.

The proposal abandoned the pending IOTA 2.0 route for a Move-based, object-oriented design inspired by an already operating architecture. It introduced DPoS, native L1 smart contracts, gas, sponsored transactions and staking. Governance selected a package of trade-offs rather than one isolated feature.

On 5 May 2025, Stardust and IOTA EVM paused while snapshots were checked. The IOTA Foundation and 12 other genesis validators signed a new checkpoint. The published process mapped treasuries, created migration artifacts and transferred the final Stardust ledger state into Rebased.

Exactly 4,600,000,000 IOTA entered genesis on a 1:1 economic basis. The decimal count moved from 6 to 9, multiplying raw units by 1,000. That was a denomination rewrite, not a thousandfold windfall.

No manual swap was required for ordinary balances, but access was operationally conditional: users needed private keys, mnemonics or compatible custody; Firefly support ended; exchanges paused deposits and withdrawals. Protocol continuity does not remove wallet and custodian migration risk.

Each roughly 24-hour epoch mints 767,000 IOTA for the validator subsidy. Pools receive rewards by stake and performance; validators take commission and delegators share the rest. The percentage inflation began near 6% annually and declines if the absolute epoch subsidy stays unchanged, but the monetary rule is protocol policy, not a bond coupon.

Users pay computation and storage. Fees up to the reference gas price are burned, tips go to validators, and storage deposits are fully refundable when the data is deleted. Supply can expand or contract at the margin; the balance between use and issuance cannot be inferred from staking APY alone.

A validator candidate needs 2,000,000 IOTA of stake. Falling below 1,500,000 starts a seven-epoch grace period; below 1,000,000 causes removal at the next boundary. The initial 13 genesis entities were a transition set, followed by a stake-ranked committee described at launch as 50 seats. This is different from the proposal’s earlier 150-slot ambition.

Stake is self-custodial, and rewards accrue only for epochs during which it is active throughout. Delegators select a validator and bear reduced rewards if it performs poorly; commission can change, subject to a 20% cap and the later dynamic minimum tied to voting power. Delegation is a live choice, not guaranteed income.

Rebased launched with Mysticeti, then protocol version 24 activated Starfish on 23 April 2026. Foundation engineers and open-source contributors wrote the change; validators running the release made it network reality. That sequence shows how the voted redesign became an operating ledger: the decision needed software, and the software needed validators to adopt it. The preserved IOTA balances now move under the rules those releases put into practice.