- In October 2025, IOTA turned 10 years old, making it a Methuselah by the standards of the crypto industry.
- Since 2015, IOTA has developed from an experimental DAG approach to a global Layer-1 infrastructure.
For the birthday in 2025 there was an airdrop of 10 million IOTA tokens, distributed across Binance Simple Earn, LiquidLink, native Staker and the anniversary event in Singapore.
The biggest technical milestone in recent years was the Rebased Protocol Upgrade, which transformed IOTA into a high-performance, fully decentralized system. It creates 50,000 transactions per second, sub-secondary finality and a delegated proof-of-stake model with up to 100 validators. This means that IOTA is ready for enterprise applications on a global scale. At the same time, the global presence grew:
- In Africa, IOTA supports the ADAPT initiative, which aims to double intra-African trade by 2035.
- In the US, integration took place with BitGo and Uphold, enabling institutional custody and native transactions.
- The vLEI framework has been officially launched in China – a system that is built directly on IOTA infrastructure and standardizes digital corporate identities.
These developments show how strongly IOTA has become anchored in real economic applications.
Quantitative and qualitative growth
New DeFi building blocks such as Swirl for liquid staking and Virtue for stablecoin liquidity expand and diversify the project’s financial layer.
The IOTA Trust Framework is an open source toolkit that combines identity verification, authentication and tokenization and offers companies a standardized basis for digital processes.
IOTA also set standards in the area of digital trading infrastructure: The Trade Worldwide Information Network TWIN uses IOTA technology to make supply chains and complete trading processes transparent and interoperable.
The combination of DeFi, secured identities and trading makes IOTA one of the few L1 networks that realistically depicts classic economic processes – not just “abstract”, often speculative financial applications.
The Future: Starfish and Multichain
IOTA has a clear roadmap for 2026 and beyond. The upcoming Starfish consensus model is intended to further increase decentralization, improve validator economics, and enable local gas fee markets.
Through integrations with LayerZero and Stargate, IOTA is already connected to over 150 networks — the foundation for the interoperable multichain future.
The second wave of anniversary airdrops is aimed at DeFi customers, liquidity providers and crosschain players. The NFT Genesis Drop is also coming up, which rewards early backers.
IOTA has now become the infrastructure for digital identities, for tokenized assets and for global trade — a clear focus with an emphasis on a classic segment of the global economy.
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