Introduction
This page provides an overview around the different protocol versions within the IOTA ecosystem.
| 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 and a complete overhaul of all APIs | PoA - Coordinator | Binary, EdDSA, UTXO, Removal of WOTS | IOTA Mainnet, DevNet |
| Stardust | September 2022 (Shimmer) | 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 | Shimmer, Public Testnet |
| IOTA 2.0 | - | The upcoming version of IOTA running under a PoS 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 | - |