Skip to main content
Home/Glossary/Tangle

Tangle

Crypto Protocol

Tangle is IOTA's original directed-acyclic-graph (DAG) ledger, where each transaction confirmed two previous ones; in May 2025 the IOTA Rebased upgrade replaced it with a Delegated-Proof-of-Stake design.

The Tangle was IOTA's original alternative to a blockchain: instead of grouping transactions into miner- or staker-validated blocks, every new transaction referenced and validated two previous ones, forming a web (DAG) of confirmations rather than a linear chain. That design needed no miners — so IOTA transactions were feeless — but it relied on a central "Coordinator" node for security, which IOTA spent years trying to remove.

In May 2025, IOTA launched "Rebased," a full architectural replacement that retired the original Tangle consensus and the Coordinator. IOTA now runs on Delegated Proof-of-Stake via the Mysticeti protocol (a permissionless validator set) over a Move-based object ledger — the same lineage as Sui. The "Tangle" name now refers to that legacy design rather than IOTA's current consensus.

IOTA remains positioned for machine-to-machine and IoT use, and has published work on embedding structured payment data (including ISO 20022-aligned payloads) in transactions — aiming to carry machine-initiated payment data through the same standards as bank payments.

Crypto Relevance

IOTA targets machine-to-machine and IoT micropayments — historically via the feeless Tangle, and since the May 2025 Rebased upgrade via a faster Move-based, validator-secured network that is staked and no longer feeless — a niche aimed at data-carrying micro-transactions too small to be economical on fee-based chains.

Get the institutional context, investment implications, and common misconceptions about Tangle — a When Moon 589 editorial deep dive for ISO 20022 investors.

Unlock AI Deep Analysis

Is this target realistic? Get the data — historical precedent, risk factors, and what it would take.

Free forever. Weekly brief only. Unsubscribe in one click.

Join ISO 20022 investors

Related Terms

Related Tools

Sources

Last reviewed: 2026-06-14

Back to Glossary

Not financial advice. Nothing on this site constitutes investment advice. Always do your own research (DYOR).