IOTA 2025

A Year of Rebirth, Growth, and Global Impact

TL;DR:
In 2025, IOTA marked its 10th anniversary with the Rebased protocol upgrade, expanded real-world trade adoption via TWIN, ADAPT, and Salus, strengthened digital trust with the IOTA Trust Framework, grew its ecosystem through hackathons and partnerships, and laid the foundation for enterprise-grade infrastructure in 2026.

2025 was a defining year for IOTA. Across protocol upgrades, ecosystem growth, developer activity, and global partnerships, the focus sharpened on one goal: delivering infrastructure that works in the real world.

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

This year, 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, and so we celebrated this milestone with our incredible community with token airdrops, staking rewards, and a Singapore event, all 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, we fully transformed the network 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.

Thanks to the protocol upgrade, 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, such as TWIN (see more below, under “Trade: Global Growth”), demonstrate that IOTA can now support enterprise-grade trade, tokenization, and global supply chain solutions at scale.

Marking 10 years of development alongside this upgrade grounded the moment in continuity rather than reinvention: IOTA building on hard-earned experience while preparing the network for the demands of large-scale adoption across trade, finance, and digital identity.

Trade: Global Growth

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 tech and the success of TLIP 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, aligning it with global standards and making it ready to onboard entire countries, process millions of transactions daily, and embed verifiable, compliant, and tokenized trade into global commerce.

In 2025, IOTA’s focus on trade digitalization and real-world adoption translated into concrete partnerships and live deployments across continents.

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.

In September, we shared plans to work with GLEIF on enabling businesses to establish verifiable digital identities that, combined with TWIN, create instant on-chain trust. At the same time, 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 BitGo delivered IOTA’s first institutional-grade foothold, bringing regulated, insured custody and unlocking compliant access to the IOTA Mainnet for U.S. institutions. This momentum continued with Uphold (one of the longest-standing exchanges in the industry) 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. The integration with Turnkey further strengthened the builder stack, providing enterprise-grade wallet infrastructure that enables 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 Swirl (liquid staking), unlock stablecoin liquidity through Virtue (CDP), trade spot assets on the Pools DEX, earn points through the Liquidlink dashboard, and engage in perpetual trading via CyberPerp. together forming 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 the IOTA Hackathon Malaysia hitting in July and our Moveathon series launching in 2025, bringing developers together to explore the Move VM. The first APAC edition was followed by an 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: our Ambassador Program transitioned to GiveRep, introducing automated rewards, transparent tracking, and global campaigns that spotlighted IOTA’s impact on trade and enterprise adoption.

Developer meetups and workshops took place from Taipei to Lagos, Accra to Jakarta, while this year also saw the East Africa Web3 Summit take place in Nairobi, held 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, Starfish, our next-generation consensus model, will deliver provably high security and low latency even in case of network degradation, making the consensus more robust and resilient to adverse events  – just what enterprise-grade infrastructure needs. IOTA Names will improve usability with human-readable identifiers, while more validators joining the network and the new Validator Score will strengthen decentralization, reliability, and accountability. Local gas fee markets will optimize costs for congested dApps, enabling fairer and more efficient network economics.

This real-world adoption is closely connected to IOTA’s DeFi ecosystem, creating a fully integrated yield ecosystem and enabling applications that are only possible on the IOTA network.

Together, these upgrades advance IOTA toward a fully production-ready, enterprise-grade network that bridges decentralized finance, real-world assets, and global trade. Look out for a major communication from our Co-Founder and Chairman, Dominik, early next year, where he will outline IOTA’s vision as it enters its second decade.

A Year of Real-World Impact

Ten years in, IOTA continues to grow as a platform that powers digital trade, identity, and finance worldwide. 2025 combined celebration and evolution: honoring the past, embracing the present, and laying the foundation for the next decade of innovation.