Tangle

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, which the IOTA Foundation says the Rebased upgrade removed.

On May 5, 2025 IOTA began migrating to "Rebased," a full architectural replacement that retired the original Tangle. IOTA now runs delegated proof of stake over a Move-based object ledger: token holders delegate to validators, and the validators run a Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol. The network launched with 13 validators, and the Starfish consensus protocol went live on IOTA mainnet on April 23, 2026. The "Tangle" name now refers to the legacy design rather than IOTA's current consensus.

IOTA was built for the Internet of Things, and the IOTA Foundation now describes its focus as digital trade, digital identity, tokenization, and IoT data. The IOTA profile on this site found no ISO 20022 conformance statement or payment-rail integration in IOTA's official site, documentation, or blog.