IOTA (MIOTA) Prepares for New Era 2.0 With Four Key Decisions

In a new post, IOTA, a decentralized distributed ledger, announces key decisions on its path forward. IOTA 2.0 will be heralded by the much-touted Stardust upgrade, which marks the protocol's next phase of development.

The impending release of IOTA 2.0 and the launch of smart contracts on IOTA are expected to be watershed moments, and IOTA will be upgraded to the Stardust protocol in around two weeks.

As IOTA prepares for the new 2.0 era, it announces that the time has come to make bold decisions, double down on IOTA, and maximize the utility and economic activity of the IOTA network.

In this light, IOTA announces four key decisions for the future. After the launch of IOTA 2.0, programmability will be introduced on the IOTA L1 by integrating general-purpose smart contracts. IOTA promises to share further details on this in the coming months.

Its second decision boils down to focus. IOTA says that together with its ecosystem, much focus will shift to maximizing the utility, scalability and economic activity of the IOTA network and the IOTA token. In this regard, the recently launched Shimmer network will continue to be the complementary staging network to validate and expedite the technical roadmap of IOTA.

Third, in what it says was a difficult decision to make, IOTA will be discontinuing development and will not release the Assembly project or its token. IOTA introduced the Layer-1 smart contract network Assembly and its accompanying ASMB token in December 2021.

IOTA stated that it had initially intended to introduce Assembly because, at the time of the announcement, it did not have a feasible solution to establish programmability through general-purpose smart contracts directly on IOTA Layer 1. However, with the upcoming releases, the role of Assembly within the IOTA ecosystem will become obsolete.

In the wake of this decision, IOTA says its focus will now be on IOTA Chains, the network's generalized smart contract framework for anchoring L2 Blockchains on IOTA and developing L1 smart contracts.

The fourth decision has to do with funding the network. IOTA says it will set up a dedicated Ecosystem Fund that will help further decentralize the governance of IOTA and support ecosystem growth. The Ecosystem Fund will be funded through a temporary token inflation that will last four years, increasing the total supply to 4.6 billion IOTA tokens.