Coin columns · Mainnet Province
IOTA: From the Tangle to a Smart-Contract Layer 1 Built on Move
From an IoT ledger to a Move-based Layer 1
IOTA is the native coin of the IOTA Mainnet, a Layer 1 blockchain led by the non-profit IOTA Foundation in Berlin. It began as the mesh-like Tangle ledger for the Internet of Things, and the May 2025 ‘Rebased’ upgrade made it a proof-of-stake chain with smart contracts.
1. Born for the Internet of Things
IOTA began in 2015 and was designed for machines exchanging tiny payments in the Internet of Things (IoT). The original ‘Tangle’ had no blocks or miners: each new transaction confirmed two earlier ones, forming a mesh (a DAG, a graph with no loops), and it promised fee-free transfers.
On the Crypto Nation map, IOTA is the city-hall tower of the IOTA district in Mainnet Province, because it is the chain’s own coin. The Berlin-based foundation leads development, and its chairman is co-founder Dominik Schiener.
2. Rebased: no Coordinator, plus Move
Early IOTA relied on a Foundation-run central device, the ‘Coordinator’, to protect the network, which long fed debate over decentralization. The Rebased upgrade in May 2025 removed it and moved the network to delegated proof of stake, where coin holders delegate to elected validators. No token swap was needed.
Rebased also put smart contracts (programs that run automatically on a blockchain) at the base layer using the Move language. The token design combines staking rewards and fee burning, and validator seats depend on performance. In April 2026 a new consensus method (how validators agree), Starfish, went live so that slow validators do not slow the whole network, the Foundation says.
3. Where it is used, and key dates
IOTA pays transaction fees and is used for staking (delegating coins to validators for rewards). The Foundation offers the IOTA Trust Framework, an open-source toolkit for identity, notarization and tokenization, and supports ‘gasless’ transactions where someone else covers the fee. LayerZero and Stargate bridges link it to other chains.
In trade, the TWIN Foundation launched in 2025 to digitize trade documents with identity, tokenization and smart contracts, building on the TLIP project in East Africa. A quarterly update dated 1 July 2026 named Kenya, Nigeria and Morocco as the first countries for the ADAPT plan.
4. Things to know
IOTA drew long criticism for relying on the Coordinator, which ended only with Rebased. The new chain began with 13 validators, the Foundation plus 12 trusted partners, and planned to grow, so decentralization is still maturing. Whether trade and identity pilots lead to large-scale use remains to be seen, and IOTA competes with many other smart-contract chains.
Researchers pointed out weaknesses in its cryptographic design around 2017, and in February 2020 the official Trinity wallet was attacked, with users’ funds stolen, and the Foundation paused the Coordinator. Staking rewards and fee burning work together, so total supply can change over time.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.