Thread by @id_iota

More or less a year ago the #IOTA Foundation announced two new networks.

#Shimmer a staging network and #Assembly a permissionless Layer2 network building on top of #IOTA.

Let's put together everything we know and speculate about their adoption and price.

A👇🧵

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Okay so first we need to get a little bit of an overview of everything #IOTA.

We need to separate between networks and technology upgrades. This is necessary to keep a clear picture of everything we will talk about in this Thread

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Simplified the #IOTA Foundation is marketing two major updates that are coming to their tech.

1) #Stardust - An update enabling the layer 1 (#DAG) to natively support customs assets (Tokens, NFTs) and be the trust anchor for layer 2 #sc networks.

For more info read 👇

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https://twitter.com/id_iota/status/1605593975087239168

which2) #IOTA2 - The fast, decetralized, permissionless, and feeless tech stack that will finally deliver on the initial vision of #IOTA.

If you are interested in the design and decisions that are behind it please read the thread below.

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https://twitter.com/id_iota/status/1602696430853840896

Okay, that will cover the tech updates coming to #IOTA. So what's up with all the networks? Well, currently we can talk about four different networks:
🟢 - #Shimmer - $SMR - live
🟡 - #ShimmerEVM - $SMR - beta
🟢 - #IOTA - $MIOTA - live
🟠 - #Assembly - $ASMB - not unveiled

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Let's start talking about why do we have #Shimmer? In anticipation of the big changes that will come to the #IOTA network with #Stardust and #Shimmer, the Iota Foundation wanted to establish a staging network.

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The idea for a staging network comes from the team behind #polkadot. They did create the #Kusama network as a staging network to have safe updates as soon as the tech comes to their polkadot main net.

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You can think of a staging network as a beta testing environment for your technology. The advantage over a simple testnet is, that the network is live and running and has real tokens with actual value. As a bad actor, you have an actual incentive to search for exploits.

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If you find exploits, you can use them to drain money from the network. This is however just the staging network and not the much higher secured and valued #polkadot (or in our case iota) mainnet.

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Okay, so #Shimmer is the staging network for #IOTA. In the future tech updates will come to #IOTA in the following order.

1. Private Testnet
2. Public Testnet
3. Shimmer
4. IOTA

Until a release candidate for IOTA is ready it has been thoroughly battle-tested.

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So #IOTA is the super secure fully tested environment and #Shimmer is the fully tested environment without the staging network in front of it.

At the time of writing this post, the #Shimmer network has a fully diluted market cap of over 132.000.000 $USD.

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The IF assured us many times, that updates won't be rushed on the staging network, but get there as soon as they are ready and fully tested.

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Okay, so that's #Shimmer, whats #ShimmerEVM? And why is that even a network?

If you read my 🧵 about #Stardust you should be already aware, that with #Stardust we get ready for #sc in the #Shimmer and #IOTA ecosystem.

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This is realized on Layer 2 networks (#Blockchain) that are anchored in the respective - #Shimmer or #IOTA - layer one network (#DAG).

The first #blockchain that is going to bring fully #Ethereum compatible smart contracts is going to be #ShimmerEVM.

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#ShimmerEVM will be a blockchain, that runs on top of #Shimmer and will bring full #smartcontractTherebility. There is no official news about the validator committee (the nodes, that secure and validate the blocks of the blockchain) but...

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@DomSchiener did hint, that the validators are community selected and distributed.

#smartcontracts will come with small fees, that have to be paid in $SMR. Sending and Receiving assets, however, will still happen fully feeless on Layer 1.

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Okay, so there we have it. We covered #Shimmer and #ShimmerEVM. Updates that have been tested on #Shimmer will come 4 to 6 months later to #IOTA. So basically we can expect to see the #Stardust upgrade on #IOTA around April and May 2023.

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That leaves us open to two things we need to talk about. The #Assembly Network and i want to speculate a little about possible scenarios where we are heading with the different networks...

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Okay to understand where we are with the #Assebmly network, we need to tell a short story of how the #IOTA Foundation designed the networks initially.

Okay, so very roughly put together, #Assembly is just a pool of validators.

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Why do we need it? Well, if everyone could just insert its smart contract chain, then we could have chains with bad validators and that would lead to huge losses, right?

#Assembly was designed as a proof of stake validator setup that lies between Layer 1 and Layer 2.

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This Set Up allows for the decoupling of chain validators and chains. Think about every dApp running its individual chain and then using #Assembly validators to validate their blocks.

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That is a more secure and trustworthy approach than the dApp developers just using their own set of validators. Furthermore, it could just release the dApp developers of the burden to pick and provide validators...

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#Assembly was furthermore also thought out as an independent chain, ready for dApp developers to release their dApps on the chain. This way not even a blockchain would've been necessary. This is directly comparable to the #ShimmerEVM coming to #Shimmer.

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Okay, okay, but what's up with #Assembly? WEN? Well, it most likely won't come as announced last year. @DomSchiener already promised to lay out the defined plans for #Assembly after they have the #ShimmerEVM up and running.

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While this does not directly say, that they have changed their plans it really shows, that #Assembly isn't in any way finalized. So what are they going to do? And when is it going to come? Let's start with the What?

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If we think back to what @jonastheis_ said in his last interview on @CryptoMiners_Co about the future of #IOTA as the base layer, he said #IOTA would be the perfect fit for two things.

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First, value transfers. This is basically what they enabled through the L1 - L2 split. Remember? Assets on L1. Asset handling through smart contracts on L2.

Second, #IOTA as the base layer for trust. Well, this is also what comes with the L2 anchoring in L1.

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Layer 2 anchors its ledger state in L1 and therefore it is using the more secure L1 to have a proof of the ledger state.

And now we are getting a little technical again.

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The Iota Smart Contract Design #ISC is built with synchronity on L1 and L2. That means, whenever a block is agreed on L2 we need to publish the new ledger state to a L1 block. Then we wait for the L1 block to be commited or published to the chain.

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This directly implies L1 finality is L2 finality. And even if the L2 validators are faster, they always need to wait for L1. Therefore we have to assume a finality for smart contracts between 5 to 10 seconds. This is fast, however not the fastes solution out there.

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Why is the #IF going for that approach. Well, lots of reasons... The main reason is most likely beeing, that this paralellity between L1 and L2 allows for bridgeless transfers between Layers. This is huge and a great USP for #IOTA.

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Think about other Layer 2 networks like @0xPolygon. They always need a bridge to transfer assets from @ethereum to their network. Bridges are centralized and happened to be most vulneral attack vector in the last years.

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Avoiding this attack vector is huge!

But why are we talking about this? Well we all agree that, we might have use cases in the future, that make faster transactions speed necessary... Gaming? Sport Betting? A lot of those might need faster finality on L2.

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And here might come #Assembly into the game again. Because there is a solution to advance finality for #ISC. The solution might zero-knowledgedge rollups. The #zk tech is one of the hype topics of 2023 and most likely 2024.

(we will cover zk tech in another 🧵)

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The #IF is very aware of the hype and @DomSchiener already said that they were working on zk tech, especially rollups. But it's not only the hype. The L1 we have with #IOTA 1.5 Chrysalis and especially with #IOTA2 is perfectly designed beeing the trust layer of zk rollups.

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Why is #IOTA2 a great fit? Well, lately everyone was tackeling scalability (#BNB, #Solana, #Avalance, #Fantom, #HBAR) and people stopped thinking to much about real decentralization. Most of the protocols have only limited decentralization.

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This comes either due to the network design itself or through costly hardware requirements that make the network validation very expensive. #IOTA2 avoided those shortcomings and really focused on real decentralization.

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So if #IOTA2 really becomes a highly decentralized network with 4 to 5 figure tps numbers, it is perfectly placed to be the trust layer of the future. That would enable a new roll up network or even a roll up plug in for Layer 2 networks.

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Both could be where #Assembly will be positioned. I do assume however, that everything related #Assembly will need to wait until 2024. 2023 is going to be the year of #ShimmerEVM and even #Coordicide on Shimmer in Q4 2023. Assembly will come later.

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Okay, thall shall be it for today. I hope we covered everything around the networks for the #IOTA #ecosystem as much as possible and even added a little Hopium. Please be aware that everything around #Assebmly up to now is fully speculative...

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and is by no means based on any official #IF announcement. Same goes for dates. Those are my guesses not any leaked informatione or official data. I will cover pricing and positioning of those networks in the next post, due to the length this thread already got.

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Please let me know if you have specific topics, i shall cover in the future. I am happy to provide insights, about everything #IOTA. Next Thread will be my price and positioning predicitions of 2023.

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If you red until this tweet. I would love to invite you into the #IOTA community.

There is the team from the Iota Foundation:
Board of directors
@DomSchiener

@navinram999

And the community mods
@PhyloIota

@antonionardella

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Also obviously our community members
@Vrom14286662
@SpecWeekly

@MoonacoPodcast

@IotaPoet
@iota_penguin
@kowei1995

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If you liked this thread and maybe even learned something new, please follow me. Also, add a like ❤️ and retweet 🐦 to the first tweet of this thread.

https://twitter.com/id_iota/status/1609957772845780992

I also added my donation addresses to my profile😇 if you want to send me a coffee🧋