IOTA (IOTA)

IOTA (IOTA) is the native cryptocurrency of the IOTA network, a distributed ledger first designed for the Internet of Things, where machines and sensors exchange data and tiny payments. Today IOTA pays transaction fees, is staked to secure the network, and is used in applications for trade documents, digital identity and tokenized assets. The smallest unit is the nano, one billionth of an IOTA.

The coin has run on several very different designs. For most of its life IOTA used the Tangle, a structure in which transactions confirm earlier transactions instead of being grouped into blocks. In May 2025 the network moved to IOTA Rebased, a delegated proof of stake chain that runs smart contracts in the Move language, the same language used by Sui (SUI). The IOTA Foundation, based in Berlin, leads development.

Imagine a future where your electric car pays a charging point by itself, a delivery drone pays for a landing spot, and a shipping container records where it has been. Each of these payments might be worth a fraction of a cent, so the network handling them has to be cheap, fast and able to cope with huge numbers of devices.

IOTA was built for that world. In the original design there was no fee at all: to send a payment, a device simply helped check two earlier payments, like a shopper who is let through the door after holding it open for the two people behind. The newer design works more like a conventional blockchain, with paid fees and a group of validators, but it keeps the goal of fast, low-cost transfers.

IOTA was founded in 2015 by David Sønstebø, Sergey Ivancheglo, Dominik Schiener and Serguei Popov, and its token began trading in 2017. The early network relied on a "Coordinator", a node run by the foundation that confirmed transactions, which critics said made it centralized. In February 2020 attackers stole about 8.55 million IOTA from users of the foundation's Trinity wallet by planting malicious code through a third-party payment integration; the foundation halted the Coordinator for several weeks while users moved their seeds to safety. Later upgrades reshaped the network:

• Chrysalis, April 2021. It simplified the protocol and introduced reusable addresses.
• Stardust, October 2023. It added native tokens and outputs that could carry data and support smart-contract layers.
• IOTA Rebased, 5 May 2025. Approved by a holder vote in December 2024, it replaced the Tangle with a proof-of-stake ledger of objects and Move smart contracts.

Under Rebased, validators selected by delegated stake agree on transactions in epochs of about 24 hours, during which the validator set stays fixed. A candidate needs at least 6 million IOTA of stake to join the set. Holders can delegate their tokens to a validator without giving up ownership and receive a share of the rewards after the validator's commission; see staking. Users pay gas fees, part of which is burned. An Ethereum-compatible layer, IOTA EVM, runs alongside the main chain for developers who prefer Solidity tools; see Ethereum Virtual Machine. Under the older Tangle design, by contrast, there were no validators or fees: each new transaction had to approve two earlier ones and perform a small amount of proof of work to deter spam, while the Coordinator issued milestones that marked which transactions were final. Removing that central component was a goal of the project for years, and Rebased achieved it by replacing the Tangle altogether rather than by decentralizing it.

IOTA once had a fixed supply, but Rebased introduced a fixed issuance of 767{,}000 new IOTA every epoch to reward stakers, offset in part by burned fees. The resulting annual inflation rate can be estimated as:

• $i$ is the approximate annual inflation rate before fee burns.
• $767{,}000$ is the number of IOTA minted each epoch.
• $365$ is the approximate number of daily epochs in a year.
• $S$ is the total supply of IOTA.

If the total supply were 4{,}700{,}000{,}000 IOTA, issuance of about 280 million tokens a year gives $i \approx 280{,}000{,}000 \div 4{,}700{,}000{,}000 \approx 6\%$, in line with the initial rate of about 6 percent described in IOTA's documentation. Because the amount minted is fixed, the percentage rate falls as supply grows.

The IOTA Foundation has focused on trade and identity projects, including work on digitizing trade documents in East Africa and on tokenization of real-world assets. IOTA is listed on several cryptocurrency exchanges. Critics point to years of centralized control through the Coordinator, the 2020 wallet theft, and frequent redesigns that have required users and developers to migrate. Others note that, despite many announced partnerships, the original machine-payment vision has seen little real use, and that Rebased turned a fee-free, fixed-supply asset into an inflationary one.

• IOTA
• IOTA documentation