IOTA (MIOTA) Prepares for New Era 2.0 With Four Key Decisions

In a new post, $IOTA, a decentralized distributed ledger, announces key decisions on its path forward. $IOTA 2.0 will be heralded by the much-touted Stardust upgrade, which marks the protocol's next phase of development.

The impending release of $IOTA 2.0 and the launch of smart contracts on $IOTA are expected to be watershed moments, and $IOTA will be upgraded to the Stardust protocol in around two weeks.

As $IOTA prepares for the new 2.0 era, it announces that the time has come to make bold decisions, double down on $IOTA, and maximize the utility and economic activity of the $IOTA network.

In this light, $IOTA announces four key decisions for the future. After the launch of $IOTA 2.0, programmability will be introduced on the $IOTA L1 by integrating general-purpose smart contracts. $IOTA promises to share further details on this in the coming months.

Its second decision boils down to focus. $IOTA says that together with its ecosystem, much focus will shift to maximizing the utility, scalability and economic activity of the $IOTA network and the $IOTA token. In this regard, the recently launched Shimmer network will continue to be the complementary staging network to validate and expedite the technical roadmap of $IOTA.

Third, in what it says was a difficult decision to make, $IOTA will be discontinuing development and will not release the Assembly project or its token. $IOTA introduced the Layer-1 smart contract network Assembly and its accompanying ASMB token in December 2021.

$IOTA stated that it had initially intended to introduce Assembly because, at the time of the announcement, it did not have a feasible solution to establish programmability through general-purpose smart contracts directly on $IOTA Layer 1. However, with the upcoming releases, the role of Assembly within the $IOTA ecosystem will become obsolete.

In the wake of this decision, $IOTA says its focus will now be on $IOTA Chains, the network's generalized smart contract framework for anchoring L2 Blockchains on $IOTA and developing L1 smart contracts.

The fourth decision has to do with funding the network. $IOTA says it will set up a dedicated Ecosystem Fund that will help further decentralize the governance of $IOTA and support ecosystem growth. The Ecosystem Fund will be funded through a temporary token inflation that will last four years, increasing the total supply to 4.6 billion $IOTA tokens.