- IOTA has activated the Starfish consensus upgrade on the testnet.
- The core idea is that the network should no longer wait for slower validators: the rest continue to work, while laggards catch up in parallel.
IOTA has made Starfish live on the testnet. The consensus upgrade should depend less on “laboratory conditions” — and should prove itself more where it counts: in real operation. Via X wrote the IOTA Foundation on Wednesday:
“Starfish is now available on the IOTA testnet. It is a comprehensive consensus upgrade designed for the real world, where trust depends on reliable data exchange between distributed systems at a global scale.”
Why IOTA Starfish is crucial
The team is thus targeting an old core problem. In previous processes, progress depended heavily on all validators staying in sync. IOTA puts it like this:
“What changes with Starfish at the consensus level? Previously, network progress depended on perfect coordination when some validators fell behind. With Starfish, the network continues to run while these validators recover in parallel.”
And why this focus? Because IOTA does not see “reliability under imperfect conditions” as a bonus, but as a minimum standard. Literally:
“Reliability under imperfect conditions should be a basic requirement – not a nice-to-have. This behavior is crucial for real-world systems such as global trade.”
Technically, the main thing is to ensure that the system doesn’t stop just because individual validators can’t keep up. The practical effect is: the network waits less. It continues to work. Lagging validators are catching up without slowing down the rest.
One lever here is the separation according to “urgency”: What needs to be distributed quickly and reliably gets priority. Anything that is large and eats up bandwidth is handled differently. The goal is not just “more TPS”, but more predictable processes for companies, institutions and other partners if the network is not perfect.
This fits with IOTA’s new direction. As CNF reported, co-founder Dominik Schiener released the “Manifesto” earlier this year, which focuses on adaptation in the real world beyond the cryptosphere.
What’s important is that Starfish is now on the testnet. This is the place where it becomes clear whether the promised robustness holds up in practice, even under stress, even if parts of the validator set “run poorly”. If the concept works, the bottom line is: less downtime due to latecomers, less coordination stress – and a more reliable process.
The next step would be implementation on IOTA’s mainnet. There is no exact release date for this yet.
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