TradeMark East Africa, Digital Identity, Regulation, Education, Governance

• The IOTA Foundation attained some key milestones in 2022, importantly towards regulations and governance issues.
• The launch of the Shimmer Network was a major event that seeks to bring further decentralization to the IOTA protocol.

The last year of 2022 was indeed a challenging one for the crypto and blockchain world. More than $1.5 trillion were wiped out in the months following the peak of November 2021.

However, the IOTA Foundation kept pushing the envelope with crucial projects in different verticals including industrial adoption, education, Research and Development, and much more. The team at IOTA Foundation also worked majorly towards the decentralization of the platform. This includes decentralizing the IOTA blockchain technology as well as the governance systems.

Let’s look at how IOTA contributed to each of these fronts.

IOTA – Research and Adoption

IOTA’s key features of transparency, immutability and secure data transfer served as the foundation for several collaborative projects. The IOTA Foundation made major progress on the European Commission’s European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI).

In early 2022, IOTA was accepted in Phase 2A for working on digital products passport (DPP) in the circular economy. This was an EU-wide intellectual property rights management in the creative industry. In Phase 2B, IOTA completed the field testing of its Stardust solution including tokenization and smart contracts.

Similarly, the IOTA Foundation collaborated with TradeMark East Africa to move the Trade and Logistics Information Pipeline (TILP) into Kenya. This partnership will extend further in 2023 wherein more than 45 organizations are involved with testing TLIP in multiple trade lanes.

On the R&D front, the IOTA Foundation unveiled the IOTA 2.0 DevNet making the codebase more stable and robust. They also updated their research into the energy consumption space proving that the IOTA protocol is still among the lowest consumers in the space.

IOTA Technology – The Shimmer Revolution and Firefly

One of the major advancements by IOTA this year was the launch of its staging network Shimmer. The Shimmer Network brings a tokenization framework to the IOTA network allowing users to tokenize assets like NFTs, stablecoins, fan tokens, and much more, on Layer 1 without any fees.

The launch of the Shimmer Network is a major milestone in the evolution of the IOTA ecosystem. Shimmer serves as a test network for developers to test new innovations and developments before bringing them to the IOTA mainnet. Here’s our complete explanation of how Shimmer can play an important role in the growth of the IOTA ecosystem going ahead.

The Shimmer Network also has its native cryptocurrency SMR token and is already available for trading on crypto exchange platforms like Bitforex and Bitfinex. These two community-based exchanges are also listed with IOTABee and Soonaverse.

Shimmer is a community-first network that airdropped 100 percent of its SMR tokens in the first three months of launch since June 2022. Along with the IOTA Ecosystem, a DAO-based treasury and a Swiss-based Tangle Ecosystem Association will be funding several projects to grow Shimmer.

Additionally, the team behind IOTA’s official wallet – Firefly – also had a very fruitful 2022. Last year, they released the first iteration of Firefly Mobile. Besides, the wallet also added support for IOTA Governance Framework for users to view the current proposals and cast their votes.

Another major release this year was the Firefly Shimmer wallet which supports the ability to claim SMR tokens via the app. This set of features includes microtransactions, native tokens, expiration times, and claiming async transactions.

Regulation, Education, and Governance

The IOTA Foundation has been aligning itself with the major regulatory changes in the blockchain space. Besides, the IOTA Foundation is also an active member of the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) as well as the European Blockchain Association. Besides, the IOTA Foundation has also contributed to multiple working groups, presentations, and papers.

They have also incorporated all the recommendations from INATBA in its final version. The IOTA Foundation has initiated measures to spread regulatory know-how through its “Let’s Talk About Regulation” sessions. In 2022, IOTA was also part of several global conferences. This includes GS1 Global Forum, Mobile World Conference Barcelona, DMEXCO, European Identity, and Cloud Conference.

The IOTA foundation has now been working hard in educating and entertaining the community. The IOTA Content Creators’ DAO is specifically devoted to creators with all things IOTA. They are also supporting creators by offering regular updates with IOTA news and opinions.

Furthermore, the IOTA Foundation is making a move towards a fully decentralized governance structure. They are thus working on bringing decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to the IOTA ecosystem so that there’s no single entity controlling the protocol. Last year in May 2022, IOTA unveiled the IOTA Governance Forum. This is a place for engineers and developers to discuss protocol improvements. Besides, other stakeholders can also contribute ideas for future protocol implementation.

The IOTA community voted for one such proposal in the Governance Forum back in August 2022. This includes the creation and funding of a Treasury DAO for the ecosystem around Shimmer.

The good thing about the Shimmer Network is that it supports a decentralized, multi-chain smart contract future. It makes it possible for new token economies and dApps to be built by anyone and listed/traded on decentralized exchanges. The Shimmer tokenization framework adds support for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible smart contracts.