The time has finally come. With Chrysalis, IOTA is now enterprise-ready and has entered a new era of adoption, serving as a base layer for the machine economy, the Internet of Things and beyond, enabling new use cases and setting standards in data and value transfer. All of this is achieved without fees and while maintaining a minimal environmental footprint.

Partners, academia, and developers can now start to build on the Tangle and plan for the future.  There will not be substantial changes on the way to IOTA 2.0, Coordicide, as the majority of the code-base including tools, libraries, and APIs already exists in Chrysalis. Projects built on today’s codebase will not require major refactoring later on.

With the work for Chrysalis complete, many of the Foundation's engineers are now able to fully focus on Coordicide, Digital Assets and Smart Contracts. The next major milestone to a fully decentralized IOTA 2.0 is around the corner, with the Nectar network launching in just a few weeks!

Nectar will be the first complete implementation of the major Coordicide modules, which will be followed by the launch of the incentivized testnet. The goal of this network is to discover any bugs and issues and make any refinements before a release candidate for the IOTA mainnet.

IOTA will become the first production-ready DLT network based on a fully decentralized leaderless consensus protocol that is scalable, feeless and secure. This is a tremendous pioneering achievement and milestone for the innovation of distributed ledger technology. All achieved without requiring any miners or wasting resources.

Eoin Treacy's view

IOTA gets faster the more it is used which makes it ideal for scalability and it does not require millions of machines running in tandem to solve algorithms to do it. The challenge is that until now it has had to rely on central coordination to achieve these feats. The ambition of the teams supporting IOTA’s Tangle (its rough equivalent of the blockchain) has been to achieve coordicide. That would enhance independence and turn IOTA into a true decentralised network. Today’s announcement brings that moment much closer.

My view since 2013 is that bitcoin is an interesting project but it will not be the system that delivers on the promises of the cryptocurrency sector. In that regard I have compared it to Netscape and how it was the largest browser in the world and has been completely subsumed by Chrome. A decade from now there is clear scope for a similar trend in the cryptocurrency market. IOTA might not be the winner but bitcoin has a big challenge with processing speeds. If any semblance of the utopian future is to be approached that has to change.