- IOTA sees 2025 as a turning point: “Rebased” is the focus.
- For 2026, IOTA is relying on adoption via trading (TWIN/ADAPT), cross-chain (LayerZero/Stargate) and DeFi/Trust expansion.
2025 was a turning point for IOTA: the 10th anniversary marked a profound protocol upgrade with “Rebased”, as well as real adaptation, new infrastructure integrations and an expanded trust and DeFi stack. In a new one Blog post As of December 31, 2025, the IOTA Foundation is taking stock of the year and it is extremely positive.
Ten years of IOTA
For its anniversary, IOTA is putting technical progress in the foreground:
“The Rebased Protocol upgrade represents the most significant technical achievement in the history of IOTA. In 2025, we have completely transformed the network into a high-performance, decentralized Layer-1 without technical legacy – one of the oldest networks to achieve this.”
With Rebased the coordinator was removed. Since then, IOTA now runs as a fully decentralized delegated proof-of-stake network “with up to 100 elected validators.” At the same time, Move smart contracts were integrated “on the base layer”.
The economic layer has also been adjusted: staking rewards, transaction fees with fee burning and storage deposits. In addition, the IOTA Foundation emphasizes the improvements in consensus, gas pricing and validator selection in the blog post. But the biggest advance is performance:
“Thanks to the protocol upgrade, IOTA now achieves over 50,000 TPS with finality under one second (around 400 ms on average) and is therefore production-ready for large-scale deployments.”
Trade as a leitmotif: TWIN, ADAPT and Salus
Rebased is described as a prerequisite for a stronger trading agenda:
“By unlocking IOTA’s full potential, the rebased upgrade paved the way for the growth of TWIN, the Trade Worldwide Information Network. Building on IOTA technology and the success of TLIP in East Africa, the newly launched TWIN Foundation demonstrated how digital identity, tokenization and smart contracts can transform trade.”
For 2026, IOTA announces that it will connect TWIN to the mainnet, with the aim of “onboarding entire countries”, processing “millions of transactions daily” and embedding “verifiable, compliant and tokenized trade” into global supply chains.
In Africa, IOTA refers to ADAPT: together with the AfCFTA Secretariat, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and the World Economic Forum, IOTA is a “founding technology partner” of a continental initiative to digitize trade:
“ADAPT aims to double intra-African trade by 2035 and unlock tens of billions of dollars in economic potential.”
A second block concerns trade finance and digital corporate identities. The IOTA Foundation writes:
“In September, we shared plans to work with GLEIF to enable companies to establish verifiable digital identities that – combined with TWIN – create instant on-chain trust.”
At the same time, Salus has shown how trade finance for critical minerals can be modernized: tokenize documents, anchor identities, and automate payments via smart contracts.
US Access, DeFi, Trust Framework and Looking Ahead
Regarding the IOTA token, the foundation writes that 2025 was a turning point for adoption in the USA: As CNF reported, BitGo brought “regulated, insured custody” and thus institutional-grade access to the IOTA mainnet. Uphold subsequently launched native buying/selling and deposits and withdrawals for US users.
At the infrastructure level, IOTA highlights the connection to LayerZero and Stargate: This means that the IOTA mainnet is connected to “more than 150 blockchain networks”, including Ethereum, Solana, Base and BNB Smart Chain.
To this end, the IOTA Foundation outlines a growing DeFi stack (Swirl, Virtue, Pools DEX, Liquidlink, CyberPerp) and focuses on the IOTA Trust Framework as an open source toolkit for identity, notarization, tokenization and “gasless transactions”.
The ambitions for 2026 are great:
“Three countries have already been confirmed to deploy via ADAPT on the IOTA mainnet, and five more are starting pilot programs.”
Technically, IOTA announces Starfish as the next consensus, plus IOTA Names, more validators including “Validator Score” and local gas fee markets.
The picture that the review paints is clear: 2025 was less a cosmetic rebranding at IOTA than a conversion for scaling, and 2026 should show that this will result in adaptation on the international stage.
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