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.
