IOTA (MIOTA) Live Price and charts Today

What is the token usage of IOTA?

IOTA is used as a native currency within the IOTA network. IOTA can be used for peer-to-peer payments and value storage within the IOTA network. The absence of transaction fees makes IOTA particularly well-suited for processing microtransactions. Its intended use will be for machine-to-machine transactions between IoT devices.

What is the IOTA Crowdsale?

IOTA completed a token sale and distributed 999.99 million IOTA in 2015, raising a total of 1,337 Bitcoin, equivalent to $434,000 at the time. The supply was later changed to 2.78 billion IOTA. 5% of the funds from the IOTA's token offering were later donated to the IOTA Foundation.

What is staking on IOTA?

In IOTA, staking will work differently than in traditional Proof of Stake. The staking process is not inherent to the security of the network in its current form (this might change with future protocol upgrades). Instead, IOTA staking is a process whereby IOTA token holders can participate in the open distribution of any kind of new token. It is a mechanism to fairly distribute new tokens to a set of already existing, active users. One could also define IOTA staking as “rolling airdrops”.

How does staking work in IOTA?

Staking IOTA tokens is done through a simple transaction within the Firefly wallet to indicate to the network the beginning of the participation in staking tokens. All nodes in the IOTA network using the new staking plugin can recognize and process staking information, record them individually and calculate rewards associated with any IOTA addresses on which staking has been activated.

All participating staking nodes therefore continuously calculate all rewards and update their local view of “who should get how much” roughly every 10 seconds. Nodes running the staking plugin are accordingly also able to serve users with the current staking status and continuously updated, calculated rewards.

All users need to do is connect to a node that runs the staking plugin. Firefly guides users to a different node in case they connect to a node that is not able to serve staking information.

Staking information is attached to IOTA addresses and shared by all participating staking nodes. The nodes, therefore, get the same information and are individually able to calculate rewards. In this way, we can guarantee that staking rewards can be individually validated by nodes and users connecting their Firefly wallets to nodes.

Please note: Connecting wallets to nodes that are unable to serve updates on staking information (due to them not running the staking plugin) does not interrupt the staking process. It simply means that Firefly can not update the status and reward information.

Staking rewards are assigned to IOTA mainnet addresses - the ones holding the IOTA tokens that are being staked. To acquire rewards (e.g. Shimmer tokens on the Shimmer network), users will need to sign a special transaction with Firefly, using the private key for the address the original, staked IOTA tokens were held on. Firefly does all this automatically through a click of a button.

After staking ends or after users decided to no longer stake IOTA tokens, users can safely transfer their IOTA tokens to other addresses, but should ensure they look after their private keys in order to be able to have Firefly sign the transaction that makes rewarded tokens accessible e.g. the Shimmer network.

What are the IOTA staking rewards?

The IOTA supply is capped and IOTA is one of the few networks without inflation. When someone stakes IOTA tokens, the staking rewards are therefore not paid out in newly minted IOTA tokens, but in the tokens which are launched on the IOTA network and on other networks. This means that users will not earn more IOTA tokens, but will earn tokens from new crypto networks or applications. The best example of this process is the Shimmer network. In this case, IOTA token holders can stake their IOTA tokens to receive Shimmer tokens as rewards.

IOTA staking offers token holders the opportunity to be early in the token distribution of new projects and networks. Instead of missing out or being pushed out of public sales or airdrops, anyone is able to participate and earn token rewards. Staking IOTA tokens means not missing out on new token opportunities and being rewarded for showing an early interest in participating in emerging token economies as they are built.