IOTA's plans for the new year

In recent years, it sometimes seemed from the outside that the crypto project IOTA was floating around somewhat aimlessly. But this new year, everything should get better. With an upgrade approved by the IOTA community in December, new emphases will be placed on technical development, ecosystems will be tapped and more users will be attracted. With "IOTA Rebased," the developers are pursuing a specific goal: mass adoption. With that, 2025 could also be something of a fresh start. How the project is repositioning itself now and what application areas are in its sights.

After years of development, with a test net already launched and after one of the biggest challenges on the roadmap, the Coordinator, had been addressed, it was all the more surprising when the team around Dominik Schiener suddenly pulled the emergency brake in November. IOTA 2.0 is a thing of the past, in its place comes the protocol upgrade IOTA Rebased. With a development time of a few months, it indicates a relatively manageable time frame.

What is changing at IOTA?

One of the biggest innovations is one that most will probably not notice. In the future, IOTA will use Move, a programming language established by a new generation of blockchains such as Sui and Aptos. For developers, this language should be easy to use. Moreover, the new Move Virtual Machine offers advantages in terms of security and scalability. Ethereum's still common programming language Solidity remains in use on a Layer-2.

At the same time, Rebased should increase the profitability of the protocol. Through a token-burning mechanism, as is now common in many blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana, transaction costs will be destroyed in the future. This should gradually reduce the supply of tokens and lead to an incremental price increase. A Delegated-Proof-of-Stake process should further improve the incentive structure for security and use of the network.

Focus on applications The technical changes are setting the direction. More activity, higher usage, increasing profitability: IOTA is gearing up for mass adoption. According to the IOTA Foundation, the main focus is on "developing ecosystems and applications that promote adoption and use."

As far as industrial applications are concerned, they therefore want to expand projects in the field of trade logistics. In 2020, the IOTA Foundation together with TradeMark Africa established the trade initiative "Trade and Logistics Information Pipeline," or TLIP for short - an IOTA-based supply chain tracking system. Pilot projects are currently underway in Kenya, Great Britain and the Netherlands. Long-term plans are to expand further.

Growing market for Real World Assets (RWA).

This ties into an area that IOTA has had its eye on for some time. The tokenization of Real World Assets is considered one of the biggest growth markets in the crypto sector. The upgrade aims to capitalize on this in the long term. IOTA Rebased would support tokenization and on-chain management of physical assets and efficient and secure handling of ownership, compliance and financial transactions in sectors such as real estate, commodities and supply chains.

Planned is "a fully decentralized on-chain order book DEX." For this, IOTA says Layer 1 must be able to "execute several thousand transactions per second." This is also why the move to the Move Virtual Machine, which makes this possible. Research and projects IOTA also wants to deepen in decentralized identity solutions and smart cities. In both areas, IOTA is involved in EU-funded initiatives.