Introduction
This page provides an overview of the different IOTA protocol versions.
| Name | Release Date | Description | Consensus | Features | Networks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Legacy Trinary | 2016 | Based on a probabilistic consensus algorithm using random walks on a DAG, the original version of the IOTA protocol | PoA - Coordinator | Bundles, trinary | - |
| Chrysalis Phase 1 | August 2020 (IOTA Mainnet) | Replaced the heavy probabilistic consensus algorithm to use the White-Flag approach instead | PoA - Coordinator | White-Flag Confirmation | Legacy IOTA Mainnet |
| Chrysalis Phase 2 | April 2021 (IOTA Mainnet) | Switched from trinary to binary for data representation, changed from an account model to UTXO, removed Winternitz One Time Signatures (WOTS) and introduced EdDSA, dust protection(iota 1.5) To prevent IOTA from being exploited, one might continually send 1i to newly generated addresses for years, causing the ledger’s memory requirements to surge until only large servers could operate a full node. With Chrysalis, microtransactions (<1Mi) require the recipient address to enable dust. This permits a limited amount of dust transactions. Additionally, addresses with Colored Coins must be tokenized. Post-Coordicide, IOTA 2.0 will introduce a different solution. and a complete overhaul of all APIs | PoA - Coordinator | Binary, EdDSA, UTXO, Removal of WOTS | DevNet |
| Stardust | September 2022 (Shimmer), October 2023 (IOTA Mainnet) | Upgraded the ledger to support multiple assets instead of just the base token, switched the dust protection to a more granular one based on exact byte costs, renamed vertices from "messages" to "blocks", introduced concepts such as FoundryOutput, AliasOutput and NFTOutput. Also added the foundation for ISC anchoring via AliasOutputs. | PoA - Coordinator | Multi-Asset Ledger, ISC support, Byte Cost Based Dust Protection, Blocks as vertices, Bech32 addresses | IOTA Mainnet, Shimmer, Public Testnet |
| IOTA 2.0 | - | The upcoming version of IOTA running under a dPoS scheme with a leaderless consensus algorithm called On-Tangle-Voting. Introduces the concept of mana, which is a resource used to pay for network utilisation. | PoS - OTV | Mana, Staking, PoS, AccountOutput, ICCA | - |