IOTA 2025: A Year of Rebirth, Growth, and Global Impact

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: IOTA 2025 Original Link:

A Decade and a New Chapter: IOTA Turns 10 with Rebased

In 2025, IOTA celebrated its 10th anniversary, marking a decade of development, innovation, and real-world impact. 10 years of continuous operation and progress in the crypto market is an achievement that only a few other projects can claim. This milestone was celebrated with the community through token airdrops, staking rewards, and a Singapore event, while embracing a new chapter in the network’s evolution: the Rebased protocol upgrade.

The Rebased protocol upgrade represents the most significant technical achievement in IOTA’s history. In 2025, the network was fully transformed into a high-performance, decentralized Layer 1 without technical debt – one of the oldest networks to achieve this. Rebased removed the Coordinator, introducing a fully decentralized Delegated Proof-of-Stake network with up to 100 elected validators, and integrated Move smart contracts at the base layer. It also enhanced IOTA’s tokenomics, including staking rewards, transaction fees with fee-burning, and storage deposits, and improved security and performance with resilient consensus mechanisms, fairer gas pricing, and dynamic validator committee seat selection based on performance.

IOTA now achieves over 50,000 TPS with sub-second finality (~400ms on average), making it production-ready for large-scale deployments. Real-world applications demonstrate that IOTA can now support enterprise-grade trade, tokenization, and global supply chain solutions at scale.

Trade: Global Growth

The Rebased upgrade paved the way for the growth of TWIN (Trade Worldwide Information Network). Building on IOTA tech and previous success in East Africa, the newly launched TWIN Foundation demonstrated how digital identity, tokenization, and smart contracts can transform trade. In 2026, TWIN will be aligned with the IOTA Mainnet with upgraded architecture, making it ready to onboard entire countries, process millions of transactions daily, and embed verifiable, compliant, and tokenized trade into global commerce.

In partnership with the AfCFTA Secretariat, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the World Economic Forum, IOTA became a founding technology partner in ADAPT, a continental initiative to digitalize African trade. By integrating digital identity, cross-border data exchange, and interoperable finance into a shared digital public infrastructure, ADAPT aims to double intra-African trade by 2035 and unlock tens of billions of dollars in economic value.

IOTA also shared plans to work with GLEIF on enabling businesses to establish verifiable digital identities that, combined with TWIN, create instant on-chain trust. Salus demonstrated how IOTA can modernize trade finance for critical minerals by tokenizing documents, anchoring digital identities, and automating payments with smart contracts, addressing structural inefficiencies behind the $2.5 trillion trade finance gap.

Finance: Institutional Adoption and Market Access

2025 was a turning point for IOTA’s presence in the United States. Integration with an institutional-grade custody provider delivered IOTA’s first regulated, insured custody solution, unlocking compliant access to the IOTA Mainnet for U.S. institutions. This momentum continued with a major exchange enabling native buying, selling, deposits, and withdrawals of IOTA tokens for U.S. users, celebrated with a 1 million IOTA trading competition.

At the infrastructure level, connecting the IOTA Mainnet with LayerZero and Stargate linked IOTA to more than 150 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, and BNB Smart Chain. This expanded IOTA’s reach across the multichain ecosystem, supporting cross-chain asset transfers, real-world asset tokenization, and sophisticated multichain applications. Integration with enterprise-grade wallet infrastructure further strengthened the builder stack, enabling teams to ship secure, user-friendly applications at scale.

A Flourishing DeFi Ecosystem

IOTA’s on-chain economy is expanding rapidly with its DeFi ecosystem. The IOTA token can earn staking rewards while remaining liquid via liquid staking protocols, unlock stablecoin liquidity through collateralized debt positions, trade spot assets on decentralized exchanges, earn points through dashboard programs, and engage in perpetual trading. Together, these form a coherent and concise DeFi stack.

Identity: Expanding Digital Trust

Trust remains central to IOTA’s pathway to adoption. In 2025, the IOTA Trust Framework matured into an open-source toolkit for organizations building real-world applications on public blockchain infrastructure. Offering building blocks for identity, notarization, tokenization, and gasless transactions, the framework allows real-world deployments at scale.

From digital credentials to supply chain verification and tokenized asset management, the Trust Framework powers secure, auditable, and compliant solutions, removing technical barriers and enabling organizations to focus on delivering value.

Showcasing Innovation

The IOTA Business Innovation Program welcomed new projects, expanding the breadth of solutions built on IOTA public infrastructure. Hackathons continued to inspire builders, with events taking place across Asia-Pacific and Europe. The Moveathon series launched in 2025, bringing developers together to explore the Move VM. The APAC edition was followed by a European edition, which saw 395 participants create 28 projects over nine weeks, culminating in an online showcase that demonstrated the real-world potential of IOTA-powered applications.

The IOTA community remained a central part of 2025’s successes, with the Ambassador Program transitioning to introduce automated rewards, transparent tracking, and global campaigns that spotlighted IOTA’s impact on trade and enterprise adoption.

Developer meetups and workshops took place across multiple continents from Taipei to Lagos, Accra to Jakarta, while the East Africa Web3 Summit took place in Nairobi in partnership with TradeMark Africa, bringing together industry leaders, developers, and innovators to explore the future of decentralized applications and digital trade infrastructure.

Looking Ahead to 2026

The momentum continues into 2026 as IOTA scales real-world adoption and enterprise-grade infrastructure. Three countries are already confirmed to deploy on IOTA Mainnet via ADAPT, with five more beginning pilot programs, marking a step-change in national-level adoption.

At the protocol level, next-generation consensus improvements will deliver provably high security and low latency even in case of network degradation, making the consensus more robust and resilient to adverse events. Additional improvements include human-readable identifiers for usability, more validators joining the network to strengthen decentralization, and local gas fee markets to optimize costs for congested applications, enabling fairer and more efficient network economics.

These upgrades advance IOTA toward a fully production-ready, enterprise-grade network that bridges decentralized finance, real-world assets, and global trade, with major communications coming early next year outlining IOTA’s vision as it enters its second decade.