Timeline and Further Information
TL;DR:
The Stardust protocol upgrade on the IOTA network is happening on Wednesday, October 4th at 8AM CEST, introducing the tokenization framework and with it the ability to anchor L2 smart contract chains to it. In addition, the former IOTA network will be forked, resulting in the IOTA network based on the Stardust protocol version with an increased supply; and IOTA Classic, which will also be based on the IOTA Stardust protocol but keep the old supply.
The Stardust protocol upgrade and fork of the IOTA network will commence Wednesday, 04 October 2023, at around 8 a.m. CEST. This follows our initial announcement on 15 September 2023.
Due to the fork, you can expect a downtime of up to 4 hours. We’ll announce the beginning and finalization of the procedure through our official IOTA X account (formerly “Twitter”).
The Stardust protocol version was first introduced on the Shimmer network on 28 September 2022 and has been trialed since without any issues or incidents.
A snapshot of the ledger will be generated, which will be made available on GitHub under this address after the fork commences. The snapshot will be verifiable by using https://github.com/iotaledger/snapshot-tool-new-supply, also after the fork commences. Information about the snapshot will be made available in this GitHub repository.
If you maintain a node on the IOTA network, following the Stardust upgrade, you should upgrade your software to the latest Hornet release, which will be available soon with the version number 2.0.0. You can download the new Firefly IOTA version 2.0.0 here after the network is operational.
Please note that we will not provide any tooling or software for the IOTA Stardust Classic network. An endpoint for IOTA Classic will be available at https://api.iota-classic.iotaledger.net after the fork commences. To the best of our knowledge, no one has yet attempted to garner community support to take over the maintenance of the IOTA Classic network. We welcome any moves to do so: if you are interested, get in touch via Discord.
The new Firefly wallet version contains a tab displaying the airdrop sent to users who previously staked for Assembly tokens. After the Stardust upgrade is complete, ~10% of the airdrop will be immediately available to users, with the remaining ~90% vesting every two weeks over a period of 24 months. No user action is required to migrate tokens to the IOTA Stardust network and no action is required to access the airdropped IOTA tokens.