Internet of Things blockchain ecosystem IOTA continues to evolve and its latest development is the launch of the Shimmer network.
The Shimmer network officially launched on Sept. 28 following two months of battle testing, according to the announcement. The network is an extension of IOTA’s Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) blockchain providing a staging network for the IOTA ecosystem. It will be used to test and validate product updates such as the IOTA 2.0 upgrade.
Shimmer is essentially a composable tokenization framework that opens up new possibilities to tokenize everything from stablecoins to NFTs to real-world assets natively on Layer 1 without fees. Shimmer’s smart contract execution layer also includes full EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatibility. ShimmerEVM will be the next chain to be launched on the network in a few weeks.
IOTA canary network
Shimmer is a separate layer-1 network designed to foster a new dApp and smart contract ecosystem. It will be similar to Polkadot’s canary network Kusama which is used to deploy dApps and smart contracts before they go live on the mainnet.
The Shimmer UTXO-based ledger is highly scalable and boasts a five-second finality time. Zero fee transactions and parallel layer-2 chain connectivity are other features of the network.
It also allows users to create, mint, and assets natively on the layer-1 chain with zero fees and no dependence on third-party blockchains. Bridgeless native asset transfers across the entire ecosystem are also available.
Shimmer is powered by the SMR token which was distributed to the community with no venture capital involvement. There was a genesis supply of 1.8 billion SMR with 1.4 billion generated from users staking IOTA coins over a three-month period. Now that Shimmer has been launched, stakers can claim their SMR tokens.
Price outlook
IOTA has fallen out of favor among investors and traders over the past couple of years. It was a top ten cryptocurrency asset five years ago, but now it ranks 58th with a market capitalization of $832 million.
IOTA was trading at $0.302 at the time of press after gaining 1.5% on the day. The coin has performed well over the past week leading up to the Shimmer launch having made 20%.
However, like most altcoins, it is languishing a long way down (94%) from its all-time high in December 2017 when it hit $5.17. SMR tokens have yet to commence trading on exchanges.
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