IOTA is a layer-1 distributed ledger network built for enterprise solutions, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, and global trade infrastructure.
IOTA was founded in 2015 by Sergey Ivancheglo, Serguei Popov, David Sonstebo, and Dominik Schiner. The project was officially announced during the 2015 Bitcoin talk forum. In the same year, IOTA began developing the Tangle architecture.
In 2017, a more formalized description was published after Popov released a white paper titled the “Tangle.” It uses a Directed Acyclic Graph, or DAG, which enables scalable, low-fee, and parallel transaction processing.
In practice, Tangle uses a DAG in which two previous transactions must directly approve each new transaction. This structure allows the network to expand as more activity occurs on the ledger.
Initially, the project was called the Jinn Project—aimed at developing low-cost, energy-efficient hardware for the IoT ecosystem.
At first, IOTA was designed and advertised as an ecosystem for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the network has evolved into a project with multiple goals, particularly in Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization.
In September 2014, Jinn held its first crowd sale for the tokens. In 2015, Jinn was rebranded as IOTA, and another token sale followed, raising $590k in total. The network finally went live in 2016 after a successful initial coin offering.
After the rebranding, Jinn token holders could convert their tokens to IOTA. In 2017, IOTA joined the Trusted IoT Alliance, a group of organizations and businesses dedicated to developing open standards for IoT technology.
The same year, the network saw massive growth in popularity and adoption, with the market cap exceeding $15 billion.
In equal measure, the project faced heavy criticism and scrutiny due to security vulnerabilities and issues with the network’s consensus mechanism. Despite these concerns, IOTA continued to develop and innovate, thus effectively addressing these problems.
In fact, to make the network fully decentralized, IOTA introduced the Coordicide project in 2019. This initiative aimed at removing the centralized coordinator node from the IOTA network.
In 2021, the IOTA team conducted another funding round, raising $100 million, which cleared the path for network growth.
To successfully achieve the set goals while effectively competing with other chains, IOTA has undergone a total structural reengineering.
In doing so, the network moved away from the earlier experimental architecture to a modern decentralized layer 1 chain. In the process, the network has undergone a series of upgrades.
Firstly, in October 2020, IOTA launched the Chrysis phase 1, and phase 2 (minnet migration) was completed in 2021. Through the upgrade, the network shifted from a ternary logic structure to a standard binary system.
The upgrade dramatically stabilized transaction speed and reduced confirmation times to under 20 seconds.
In 2023, IOTA underwent the Stardust upgrade, which transformed the layer 1 into a multi-layer ledger. The upgrade allowed users to mint and transfer native tokens and NFTs directly on the Tangle without fees.
In 2024, IOTA launched an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible layer-2 chain anchored directly to the Stardust L1.
In 2025, the team abandoned previous theoretical upgrade paths and rebased the network using an advanced object-based move VM directly on layer 1. The recent upgrade transformed IOTA into a competitive, hyper-scalable layer 1 network processing over 50,000 transactions per second.
The rebased mainnet upgrade of 2025 had a significant impact on IOTA’s tokenomics. The network transitioned from a fixed supply to a dynamic burn-and-mint tokenomics model. To enforce long-term supply discipline and maintain equilibrium, the network balances rewards and deflation.
Inasmuch, while participants are rewarded, token burns also remain central, with 100% of all base fees and storage gas fees permanently burned.
