IOTA

IOTA was first announced on Bitcointalk in October 2015 by a founding team the IOTA Foundation names as David Sønstebø, Sergey Ivancheglo, Serguei Popov, and Dominik Schiener. The protocol is stewarded by the IOTA Foundation, registered in Berlin, Germany. IOTA was built for the Internet of Things: the idea that billions of devices need to transact tiny amounts of value and data with each other without paying fees that exceed the transaction value. In 2025 the project marked its 10th anniversary and completed the biggest technical change in its history.

IOTA originally ran on the Tangle, a directed acyclic graph where each new transaction validates earlier ones, and the Foundation itself described that protocol as feeless. It also relied on a Coordinator node, which the IOTA Foundation says the Rebased upgrade removed. On May 5, 2025 IOTA began migrating to Rebased: a Move-based, object-oriented ledger secured by delegated proof-of-stake, where token holders delegate to validators and the validators run a Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol. The network launched with 13 validators (the IOTA Foundation plus 12 other operators) and a planned maximum of 150. The Starfish consensus protocol went live on IOTA mainnet on April 23, 2026. Move, the smart contract language IOTA uses, is Rust-based and object-centric, and other networks such as Sui and Aptos also build on Move.

IOTA is no longer feeless. Every transaction pays a computation fee and a storage fee, part of the computation fee is burned, and users can add an optional tip; applications can sponsor fees on behalf of their users. Staking rewards for validators and delegators come from newly minted tokens (a validator subsidy) plus tips. IOTA's documentation does not publish a fixed staking yield, so treat any quoted APY as variable. On performance, the IOTA Foundation reports over 50,000 TPS with sub-second finality of about 400 ms on average; these are the Foundation's own figures, and we did not find a TPS or finality number in the IOTA technical documentation pages we checked. As a snapshot of decentralization, a query of IOTA's mainnet RPC on September 29, 2026 returned 63 active validators against a configured maximum of 150, with the ten largest holding about 47% of voting power and the six largest together holding more than one third.

IOTA has no formal ISO 20022 standing that we can source. We searched IOTA's official site, documentation, and blog and found no ISO 20022 conformance statement or payment-rail integration; the Foundation describes its focus as digital trade, digital identity, tokenization, and IoT data. ISO 20022 is a financial messaging standard, and any blockchain could carry data formatted to it, so the tie is aspirational rather than operational and this site classifies IOTA as ISO 20022 Adjacent.

Partnership history is mostly Tangle-era. Dell Technologies, the Linux Foundation, and the IOTA Foundation announced Project Alvarium, a data confidence fabric, in October 2019. Jaguar Land Rover announced a Smart Wallet trial with the IOTA Foundation in April 2019. Zebra Technologies and the IOTA Foundation released the Zebra-IOTA Edge SDK with an identity enabler in May 2022. The IOTA Foundation also completed the European Blockchain pre-commercial procurement funded by the European Commission. These projects predate Rebased, so they say little about the current network. More recent work centers on trade: the IOTA Foundation helped develop ADAPT (Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade) with the AfCFTA Secretariat, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the World Economic Forum, and Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria were chosen as the first countries to implement it, and its 2025 review states that three countries are confirmed to deploy on IOTA mainnet via ADAPT with five more beginning pilots. TWIN and Salus are related trade and trade-finance programs.

The Rebased upgrade was the defining moment: IOTA went from a feeless DAG protocol with a coordinator to a staking-enabled, smart-contract-capable Layer 1. The Foundation's 2025 review listed Starfish, IOTA Names, and local gas fee markets among its 2026 priorities; Starfish is now live, as the Foundation confirmed in April 2026. Watch whether Rebased attracts developers, since IOTA is competing for talent with other smart contract platforms, including other Move networks. The ADAPT country deployments will be the clearest signal of institutional traction.