IOTA Introduces New Smart Contracts To Circumvent The Network Flaws

The use of smart contracts remains the key turnaround factor with the cryptocurrency space. Smart contracts brought about the decentralization of digital assets and eliminated third-party interferences in crypto transactions.

Distributed ledger and open-source cryptocurrency, IOTA, has just launched a new smart contract beta. This latest move offers its users a platform for getting high-speed and zero-fee transactions.

IOTA emerged within the 2017 ICO boom. The digital asset came to support the Internet of Things that harmonizes physical items into the internet and digital world. Nevertheless, the cryptocurrency floated to irrelevance as interest in it died down in 2018.

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A reinvention of the network by its CEO came earlier this year. With his determination, the CEO decided not to give up on the project by upgrading it by introducing a critical new upgrade.

Advantages Of The New IOTA Upgrade

A report reveals that the beta version inculcates an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Thus, ERC-20 tokens are now interoperable within the network. Additionally, the writing of smart contracts is now in Solidity (the programming language of Ether) attached in the tangled language of the network.

Furthermore, there is added network sharding on the project. This allows high-degree operability via smart contracts wrapping to the base layer of native tokens. Remarkably, smart contracts creators can set their execution fees which will enable drive-down competitions among different chains.

MIOTA is currently facing a decline | Source: IOTAUSD on TradingView

In comparison with other networks like Ethereum, several people think that the smart contract implementation of the network is late. Nevertheless, Dominik Schiener, the IOTA CEO, is of a different opinion concerning the issue.

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Schiener explained that they took their time to develop a smart-contract solution that operates to bridge the shortfalls of other competing chains. He cited an instance with Cardano’s smart contract that faces limited throughput while IOTA’s provide unlimited scalability.

Speaking of the zero-fee on the platform, the CEO said it’s a significant competitive advantage. He explained that the feeless nature of the network serves as the doorway for their numerous opportunities.

These include their partnership with multinational companies and governmental agencies and interest from SMEs, startups, and crypto operators. Schiener mentioned that the volatile nature of fees could strain business models and oppose great economic moves.

IOTA cuts across promoting ecosystem growth and decentralized application development via project financing. Though MIOTA is making gradual progress, its current price is still far from its former glory.

However, the European Commission selected the token last month to feature in its blockchain infrastructure project despite its low position. This selection stands as a possible action that could pave the way for future growth for MIOTA.

Featured image from IOTA Services, charts from TradingView.com

How This IOTA DEX Seeks to Offer a “Unique” DeFi Experience

IOTA has undergone one of its most important milestones since its inception, on April 29th the Chrysalis Network went live. Improvements in efficiency, security, and scalability were deployed. While developers work on its next major event, the Coordicide, the IOTA-based ecosystem keeps growing.

As part of Chrysalis, new dApps have made their way into the network. Amongst them is TangleSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX), that seeks to bring DeFi into IOTA and combine it with the network’s most unique features.

The team behind this protocol has been involved with IOTA since 2017. For years, they have been planning to build on top of this network and contribute to its expansion. Via TangleSwap’s official Twitter handle, they said:

(…) we knew that once the time was right, we would like to develop and provide the best tools so that the ecosystem and the community grew in a fast, secure and strong manner.

In the coming months, this team has promised IOTA users, hodlers, buidlers, the possibility to trade and swap tokens at low costs. In addition, this DEX will operate with fees close to “free as possible”, a feature not available in competitors such as Uniswap, SushiSwap, and others.

Ethereum’s network still hosts some of the biggest DeFi protocols with billions in Total Value Locked (TVL). However, high fees and congestion made room for competitors on other blockchains to thrive.

TangleSwap, as its name suggest, will leverage IOTA’s Tangle technology. This will allow users to benefit from automated trades and more control over their operations without the limitations set by high transactions cost.

This means you will be able to trade as many times as you want, with virtually no restrictions. A feature that seems especially attractive to those seeking to automatize their operations but are being held back by insurmountable gas fees.

IOTA DEX To Enable Free NFTs Mints With Colored Coins

In addition to DeFi, the crypto space has seen a surge in interest in other sectors, such as blockchain-based games and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). TangleSwap plans to use IOTA’s Colored Coins to facilitate the minting and transfer process of these assets.

The Colored Coins were a series of methods to managed real-world assets first proposed as Bitcoin update. In the future, TangleSwap will use these methods with tokens that will represent other cryptocurrencies, company shares, and other assets. Thus, increasing the applications for NFTs.

The developers of this DEX have mid to long-term plans that contain the aforementioned use cases. Their ultimate goal is to create an “entire financial ecosystem on one platform”, IOTA. Thus, they will add a native stablecoin, implement a lending platform, liquidity provision, and more.

All of this turbo-powered by the advantages brought by the Tangle over traditional blockchain technology. (…) We will witness a transformation in the way DeFi, trading and holding work, fueled by all the possibilities enabled by the IOTA ecosystem.

At the time of writing, IOTA trades at $0,78 and has followed the general sentiment in the market with a 5.3% loss in the daily chart.

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IOTA follows the trend to the downside in the 24-hour chart. Source: IOTAUSDT Tradingview

How IOTA Could Reach $1B In Tokens Locked Before Chrysalis 2.0

On April 21st, IOTA Co-founder Dominik Schiener said the platform was about to enter a new era. Chrysalis 2.0 is set to be deployed next week with a complete overhaul of this network. Firefly, the token’s new native wallet, is a key component and will operate as a bridge from IOTA 1.0 to the 1.5 update.

IOTA (MIOTA, Mi) holders can begin their tokens migration to prepare for Chrysalis. The process is the first stage to make reach the token’s potential as a peer-to-peer digital cash, as the Technical Lead at the IOTA Foundation (IF) Charlie Varley said.

Via Twitter, Schiener celebrated a milestone in this process. Only 12 hours after it was enabled, $220 million in IOTA Tokens were locked and ready to be migrated into the new network. Schiener said the following in celebration:

This is simply amazing. After 12 hours, more than $220m #IOTA tokens are already #locked and ready for the #Chrysalis launch. Let’s reach $1 Billion tokens locked before the launch next week on the 28th!

In a special episode of IOTA Talks, Schiener clarified that the migration process is optional. Users can proceed with it at any time before and after Chrysalis’ launch. The next phase big event for the network will be Coordicide and should mark the beginning of this platform’s full decentralization. On the update, the IF said:

This relaunch will bring IOTA up to the level of an enterprise-ready product that is fully equipped for use in outside organizations and businesses that wish to leverage the power of the Tangle. Chrysalis improves the efficiency, security, scalability, and stability of the IOTA protocol (…).

IOTA Goes Higher On Bitcoin Pair

At the time of writing, MIOTA is trading at $1,72 with a 4.8% loss in the daily chart. In the weekly and monthly chart, the token has a 32.1% loss and a 20.6% gain respectively. According to analyst Lukas Tassanyi, MIOTA has held support in its BTC pair for the 30-day chart and has been making higher high after bearish price action.

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MIOTA with moderate losses in the daily chart. Source: IOTAUSDT Tradingview

Tassanyi believes the tokens formed a symmetrical triangle on the 21st when the IF launched Firefly. Possibly responding to the current developments, MIOTA was set to break or rise. Since that moment, the price has been trending downwards.

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Source: Lukas Tassanyi

As Tassanyi showed in the chart above, $1.63 could be critical support for MIOTA, if it continues south from its current levels. In the short term, the analyst expects a period of consolidation. When it reverses the trend, MIOTA could target a new all-time high at $2.57.

In the long term, the analyst expects MIOTA and its platform to benefit from “two separate arenas”: its potential as a cryptocurrency with low, fast transaction and high scalability, and the Internet of Things (IoT) market. Tassanyi added:

If IOTA manages to succeed in only one of them, that should make it a $1 Trillion project already. IOTA is both the leading blockchain alternative and the leading IoT ledger. With no close competitors.

All Hands on Deck for IOTA’s Chrysalis 2.0, This Is What You Need to Know

IOTA is ready for a major milestone with the launch of the Chrysalis phase 2 also know as the final stage for IOTA 1.5. The bridge network between IOTA and the Coordicide event which will lead it to full decentralization, Chrysalis will roll out on April 28th, 2021.

After this date, IOTA’s current mainnet will become the “legacy mainnet”. According to an IOTA Foundation official post, the infrastructure that will replace the current mainnet is already in place. The organization said:

With Chrysalis just around the corner, the team is heads down in the final bits and pieces to make everything as smooth as possible both on April 21 and April 28. Tests are being run on multiple instances of infrastructure to test all the migration scenarios.

Classifying Chrysalis phase 2 as a “new beginning for the IOTA protocol”, the Foundation said they are testing the migration on Firefly with the help of internal and external testers. Since August 2020, the organization and IOTA developers have been developing the new components for phase 2.

In that regard, the team of developers has released several versions for the Pollen testnet. This component will introduce mana, a reputation system that will help boost IOTA security.

Software node Bee has been released in an alpha phase. Developers can access it and run a Bee node with an updated dashboard with full Chrysalis migration support.

Two of Chrysalis 2.0 most important components, Smart Contracts, and Stronghold have also been released in the first versions. For the first component, the developers are “refactoring the integration to reflect” some changes in Polled.

For Stronghold, the developers have placed the component under external audit and its benchmarks are “using microseconds for measurements”, as revealed by the IOTA Foundation. The organization said:

We are working together with the IF cryptography team to identify methods for performing multisig using Stronghold’s internal libp2p-noise based communication crate. Indeed, our primary focus now is on verifying and validating this crate and its processes.

IOTA’s token migration an important step for users

On Wednesday, April 21, 2021, IOTA holders, exchanges, and custodian can begin migrating their tokens. The process will be open until Coordicide deployment.

To begin the migration using Firefly, the holders will need to enter their seeds in the wallet. Later, they will receive a new mnemonic with an EdDSA address on the Chrysalis network. This address will have the user’s token. The IOTA Foundation said:

The heavy lifting is fully automated through the Firefly wallet and token holders are guided by a simple interface.

IOTA (MIOTA) is trading at $2,16 with 12.3% losses in the daily chart following the market’s general sentiment. On the weekly and monthly chart, MIOTA has 3.8% and 62.4%, respectively.

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IOTA with moderate losses in the daily chart. Source: IOTAUSDT Tradingview

IOTA Price Hits 3-Year High as Focus Shifts on IoT Protocol Overhaul

IOTA rallied Tuesday, hitting its highest levels in more than three years, on hopes that the upcoming makeover of its Internet-of-Things protocol would make it more appealing to investors and traders alike.

The IOTA Foundation Co-founder and CEO Dominik Schiener spilled details about their major upgrade—scheduled for an April 2021 release—in an interview with ZDNet. Dubbed as “Chrysalis,” the new framework proposes introducing a distributed ledger that does not require miners, electricity, and even transaction fees.

“A new distributed ledger that doesn’t need the miners, the electricity, or the transaction fees to really have a protocol, a technology that is going to be production-ready and those billions of users, including machines and humans, are able to utilize and benefit from,” Mr. Schiener noted.

Reborn

Chrysalis also intends to do away with the coordinator node, an extremely controversial feature in the earlier IOTA versions that denoted the power to approve transactions to a few nodes, boosting the network’s centralization. Meanwhile, Mr. Schiener stated that they would introduce “rate control” to scale its transaction processing without paying additional fees.

In doing so, the IOTA cryptocurrency holders would generate a subsidiary token called “Mana” in the network to prioritize transfers, similar to transaction throughput.

“In a spectrum today, we have different frequencies,” added Mr. Schiener. “And we also have different owners — largely telecom companies, but also investors. The same is going to happen with IOTA, where large companies that want to utilize the network are also going to acquire IOTA tokens because that enables their utility.”

IOTA Explodes

Market speculators picked on Mr. Schiener’s wordings as they pushed their bids for the IOTA/USD instrument higher across February and March. Overall, the pair climbed by more than 450 percent in 2021, including gains on Tuesday that appeared in contrast with declines in the rest of the cryptocurrency market.

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IOTA breaks out of an ascending triangle pattern. Source: IOTAUSD on TradingView.com

Technically, IOTA’s latest push upward took it out of its previous trading range that constituted an Ascending Triangle. Coupled with a spike in volume, the move pointed towards a potential breakout, suggesting that the IOTA price could rally further in the coming sessions, with an upside target lurking at or above $2.