IOTA (IOTA)

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Historical price evolution of IOTA

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

IOTA was born in 2015 by four founders: David Sønstebø, Norwegian entrepreneur with previous experience in the crypto space since 2012 and founder of TBA/Stealth —an ultra-low power processor startup for IoT—; Dominik Schiener, young German entrepreneur; Sergey Ivancheglo; and Serguei Popov, mathematician and early researcher of distributed ledger technologies. The foundational premise of the project was that traditional blockchains with miners and fees were incompatible with microtransactions between IoT devices. The proposed solution was the Tangle, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where each transaction validates two previous ones, thus eliminating the need for miners and fees.

At the end of 2015, the initial crowdfunding was conducted, which raised approximately 1,300 BTC (equivalent to around 500,000 USD), distributing the total supply pro-rata amongst investors. The fixed total supply was established at 2,779,530,283,277,761 IOTAs with no possibility of additional mining. In 2016, the IOTA network was launched, beginning with OTC trading between users during the first months, until the first exchange listing occurred in June 2017 with Bitfinex.

The year 2017 marked several important milestones: initial investors donated 5% of the total supply to create the IOTA Foundation, the token reached its historical ATH during that year's bull run, and the Data Marketplace was launched as an IoT data market pilot. In 2018, the IOTA Foundation was officially established as a Stiftung (foundation) in Berlin and established partnerships with companies such as Volkswagen, Innogy, Linux Foundation and Dell Technologies.

The following years brought significant changes in leadership and technical challenges. In June 2019, Sergey Ivancheglo resigned from the board of directors following internal disputes. In February 2020, an attack on the official wallet occurred resulting in the theft of 8.52 million MIOTA (approximately 1.97 million USD), keeping the network offline for about two weeks. Sønstebø personally compensated the 46 victims with his own funds. In December 2020, the IOTA Foundation officially separated from David Sønstebø following disagreements over strategic direction and ownership of ecosystem projects.

The technical modernisation phase began in 2023 with the launch of ShimmerEVM, the ecosystem's first EVM-compatible multichain solution, and the Stardust upgrade on the IOTA mainnet, which introduced a native tokenisation framework and support for smart contracts on L2. In May 2024, IOTA EVM was launched, an L2 with full EVM compatibility on the IOTA mainnet. In December 2024, IOTA holders voted in favour of IOTA Rebased, considered the largest technical change in the protocol's history.

On 5th May 2025, the IOTA Rebased mainnet will launch, coinciding with the project's tenth anniversary. This new architecture will be based on Move VM with Delegated Proof-of-Stake (up to 100 validators), will eliminate the centralised Coordinator, will include native smart contracts on L1, and promises more than 50,000 TPS with finality in less than 500ms.

IOTA operates as a decentralised layer 1 protocol that has radically transformed its technical architecture with the Rebased launch in 2025. The system abandons the original DAG Tangle to adopt an object model executed by the Move Virtual Machine (MoveVM), incorporating native smart contracts and a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism through the Mysticeti protocol. IOTA token holders delegate their stake to validators, who must maintain a minimum of 2 million IOTA to process transactions and secure the network. The protocol organises its operation in 24-hour epochs, during which validators and their delegators receive rewards for their participation.

The protocol's economic model combines minimal transaction fees (approximately 0.005 IOTA) that are partially burnt to generate deflationary pressure, with an emission of 767,000 new tokens per epoch as rewards, resulting in an initial inflation of approximately 6% annually. Unlike many cryptocurrencies, IOTA does not have a fixed supply, but rather operates with dynamic emission governed by the protocol itself. The ecosystem is complemented with specific products such as IOTA EVM (a layer 2 compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine), IOTA Identity for decentralised digital identity management, and TWIN (Trade Worldwide Information Network), oriented towards the digitalisation of international trade, maintaining its original focus on the transfer of value and data between connected devices and users.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.