IOTA Cofounder Celebrates as Major Mainnet Upgrade Kicks Off

• IOTA co-founder has described today as the most exciting day in IOTA’s history as the Rebased Protocol upgrade kicks off. 
• IOTA is expected to achieve a Transaction Per Second (TPS) of 50,000 while introducing staking with an Annual Percentage Yield (APY) of 10-15%. 

The much anticipated IOTA Rebased mainnet upgrade officially starts today, May 5, as the network migrates from the original stardust mainnet to the new IOTA network.

Immediately after the kickoff, IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener took to X to express his excitement, claiming, “This is the most exciting day in IOTA’s history”. According to him, he has been working side by side with the community over the past ten years to fully realize the vision and witness the history being made today.

Things to Note During the Upgrade

From today, all supporting exchanges, including Binance and Bithumb, will disable deposits and withdrawals of IOTA network tokens until the transition is completed. Meanwhile, Binance has announced that users could continue to trade related tokens as all technical requirements would be adequately handled by the exchange, as detailed in our earlier publication.

IOTA has also disclosed that users are not under any requirement to migrate tokens. They simply have to load existing wallets into new ones while safely keeping their private keys and mnemonic phrases to access the tokens.

What to Expect

As previously mentioned in our blog post, IOTA hints that it would launch the new network with 13 validators. Fascinatingly, a batch of 10 validators would be supported each day until 150 validators are reached in the coming months.

IOTA’s blog post has also confirmed that several jaw-dropping changes could be seen after the full upgrade. According to them, this would include the achievement of 50,000 Transaction Per Second (TPS) with a finality time of less than 500 milliseconds.

Above this, IOTA investors would significantly benefit from the introduction of staking with the adoption of a delegated proof-of-stake network. As discussed earlier, Annual Percentage Yield (APY) is reported to be set between 10% and 15%. The addition of Move-based smart contracts would make IOTA compete with industry giants like Ethereum, Solana, and Tron. The fees generated on the network would also be burnt, making the IOTA deflationary.

Commenting on this groundbreaking move, an analyst identified as DeFiMaximalist recently disclosed that the integration of MoveVM and EVM in the upgraded network would be a “huge step,” positioning IOTA at the same level as Aptos and Sui. Even so, he highlighted that IOTA is built differently from the other chains. While it primarily focuses on real work adoption, its competitors basically focus on yield farms and meme coins.

Instead of scrapping what made it unique, IOTA doubled down on its parallelized DAG ledger and layered programmability on top. It’s modular, scalable, and suddenly a real contender for DeFi and RWA adoption.

Amidst the backdrop of this, IOTA’s trading volume had risen by 80% at press time with $30 million changing hands. However, the price was barely making any serious move as it declined by 8% in the last seven days and surged by 1.4% in the last 24 hours. With a current price of $0.2 and a market cap of $774 million, IOTA has become the 85th largest crypto in the world.

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