IOTA - the full guide

1. TL;DR

IOTA is a project that has reinvented itself more than once. It started in 2015 as a feeless ledger for the "Internet of Things" built on a DAG called the Tangle, which for nine years depended on a Foundation-run checkpoint server called the Coordinator. On May 5, 2025 the old network was shut down and replaced by "IOTA Rebased": a Layer 1 blockchain derived from the Sui codebase, with Move smart contracts, delegated proof of stake and small fees. ^{[22][11][15][16]}

The native token is IOTA. It pays transaction fees, which are burned, and it is staked with validators to secure the network. The supply is not capped: 767,000 new IOTA are minted at the end of every 24-hour epoch and paid to validators and their delegators, which the whitepaper describes as an initial annual rate of about 6 percent that falls in percentage terms over time. ^[1][4][7]

At the time of writing the mainnet's own system state reported epoch 524, protocol version 37, a total supply of about 5.00 billion IOTA, about 2.38 billion IOTA staked (roughly 48 percent of supply) and 62 active validators out of a maximum of 150. ^[2][3]

The IOTA Foundation is a German non-profit registered in Berlin in 2017; a second entity, the IOTA Ecosystem DLT Foundation, was registered in Abu Dhabi in November 2023 with more than 100 million dollars' worth of tokens vesting over four years. Together with the Tangle Ecosystem Association, these Foundation-linked entities received about 40 percent of the supply created in the 2023 Stardust upgrade, released on a public four-year schedule that ends in 2027. ^{[23][31][32][30][1]}

Real adoption centers on trade digitization: the TLIP system with Kenya's revenue authority, funded by TradeMark Africa since 2016, and the TWIN Foundation launched in May 2025 with the World Economic Forum and the Tony Blair Institute. These are verifiable programs, but their on-chain footprint is not something an outsider can measure today. ^[37][36][35]

Before you hold IOTA, understand four things: the old Firefly wallet no longer works and the official wallet is now a browser extension; addresses changed from "iota1..." to "0x..." hex; Ledger works through the IOTA Wallet extension while Trezor only lists the IOTA EVM network, not the base layer; and IOTA on the EVM Layer 2 is a bridged representation, not the same thing as IOTA on Layer 1. ^{[4][44][45][49][34]}

2. Live stats

The figures below update automatically from public market data; everything else on this page was checked at the time of writing.

3. What problem does it try to solve

The original IOTA pitch, from 2015, was that machines would soon pay each other for data, bandwidth and electricity in amounts far too small for card networks or even Bitcoin to handle. A ledger for that world had to be feeless and able to run on tiny devices. The Tangle was designed around this: instead of miners bundling transactions into blocks, every participant who sent a transaction also confirmed two earlier ones, so the network's capacity would grow with its usage rather than shrink. ^[22]

Ten years later the Foundation's own diagnosis was that this vision had stalled on one hard problem: how to remove the Coordinator safely while also adding the smart contracts that applications actually needed. In its November 2024 proposal the Foundation wrote that adding a Move virtual machine to its in-house IOTA 2.0 design would be "a multi-year effort" requiring two consecutive breaking changes, and chose instead to "use the best available solutions on the market today." ^[11]

So the problem IOTA tries to solve today is narrower and more institutional. The Foundation now describes IOTA as a "decentralized blockchain infrastructure to build and secure our digital world," and most of its public work is about trade documents, digital identity, product passports and notarized records: making the paperwork that moves goods across borders verifiable without every agency copying the same spreadsheet. Fees are small and can be sponsored by the application, so a customs agency or an exporter never has to buy tokens. ^[36][41][4]

Why would an ordinary reader care? Because the use case is concrete. TradeMark Africa describes cross-border trade as "heavily reliant on the generation, transmission, and storage of information" that is exchanged through "costly, inefficient, inaccurate, and non-transparent manual documents." If a shared ledger can let a Kenyan exporter, a UK port health authority and a bank see the same certificate at the same moment, there is a real saving. Whether that saving needs a public token is the question the rest of this guide returns to. ^[37][36]

4. History, founders, organization and governance

2015 to 2017: founding and the crowdsale

IOTA was created in 2015 by David Sønstebø, Dominik Schiener, Sergey Ivancheglo and Serguei Popov. The network went live in 2016. Development was funded by a public crowdsale in late 2015 that raised roughly 1,300 BTC, about 500,000 dollars at the time; the Foundation later stated that in 2015 "we did not reserve any tokens for the founders, team, or the foundation." Instead, the community donated tokens to the Foundation: a 2017 post records approval to access "more than 5%" of supply, about 141 Ti, for development. ^[22][30][23]

The IOTA Foundation was incorporated as a German non-profit in Berlin on November 3, 2017, "by signature of the State Secretary for Justice," with a board of directors, a supervisory board and an advisory board. Its registered address is Pappelallee 78/79, Berlin, and it signs regulatory submissions as "IOTA Stiftung." ^[23][42]

The Coordinator, the Curl dispute and the Trinity hack

From the start the network relied on the Coordinator, a special node run by the Foundation that issued "milestone" transactions; anything the Coordinator referenced was treated as confirmed. Critics called it a single point of failure, and the Foundation itself described it as a temporary security mechanism for the network's maturation phase. ^[22][25]

In September 2017 researchers from MIT's Digital Currency Initiative and Boston University published collisions in Curl-P-27, IOTA's home-made hash function, and released colliding bundles; the code is still on GitHub under the title "IOTA's hash function curl is broken." The Foundation's response, including legal threats against the researchers, drew considerable backlash. ^[24][22]

On February 12, 2020 the Foundation discovered that its Trinity wallet had been compromised through a third-party dependency from the payments provider MoonPay: malicious code loaded from MoonPay's content delivery network captured users' seeds and passwords. About 8.55 Ti of tokens were stolen from 50 seeds. Within hours the Foundation halted the Coordinator, freezing the entire network. Users were given a window from February 29 to March 7 to move funds to new seeds, and the Coordinator was resumed on March 10, 2020, almost four weeks later. ^[25][26][22]

Founder departures

Sergey Ivancheglo resigned from the board on June 23, 2019 after a dispute with David Sønstebø. On December 10, 2020 the Foundation's board and supervisory board announced that they had "officially parted ways with David Sønstebø," a unanimous decision; the Foundation said his interests had diverged from its own and declined to share details. Dominik Schiener remains as co-founder and chairman. ^[22][27][31]

Chrysalis, Stardust and the Assembly reversal

The Chrysalis upgrade (IOTA 1.5) went live on April 28, 2021, replacing the ternary encoding and one-time signatures with standard cryptography; more than 1.4 billion dollars of tokens had been locked for migration beforehand, and Binance, Bitfinex and Bitpanda migrated tokens for their customers. The Stardust upgrade followed on October 4, 2023, as a planned fork with up to four hours of downtime. ^[28][29][22]

Stardust also brought the most consequential decision in IOTA's token history. The Foundation discontinued Assembly, a planned second token, folded the ideas into IOTA, and raised the total supply from 2,779,530,283 to 4,600,000,000 IOTA. The newly created 1.82 billion tokens, about 39.6 percent of the new total, formed an "Ecosystem Fund" split between the Tangle Ecosystem Association (12 percent), the IOTA Ecosystem DLT Foundation in the UAE (12 percent), the IOTA Foundation (7.075 percent), contributors (5 percent) and an airdrop to former Assembly stakers (3.5 percent), with most allocations vesting over four years. The stated rationale was that IOTA "had struggled to compete" with projects that reserved larger budgets for growth. ^[30]

Abu Dhabi

On November 29, 2023 the IOTA Ecosystem DLT Foundation became the first foundation registered under Abu Dhabi Global Market's DLT Foundations Regulations, seeded with "more than $100 million" in IOTA tokens vesting over four years, to grow the ecosystem in the Middle East and bring real-world assets on-chain. The same entity publishes the official IOTA Wallet extension. ^[31][32][46]

Rebased: the 2024 vote and the 2025 relaunch

On November 18, 2024 the Foundation published "IOTA Rebased: Fast Forward," proposing to replace the planned IOTA 2.0 protocol with a new Layer 1 built on the Sui protocol from Mysten Labs, with Move smart contracts, staking and 150 permissionless validator slots. The post acknowledged more than 65 research papers and a working IOTA 2.0 testnet from April 2024, saying "many of the ideas and lessons" would carry over. ^[11][12]

Token holders voted from December 2 to December 17, 2024, with each IOTA accumulating 0.01 votes per milestone. The result was 98.37 percent in favor, 1.48 percent against and 0.15 percent abstaining, with 7.52 percent of supply participating. The Foundation set four conditions before mainnet: at least two months of public testnet with a stress test, a readiness review of every testnet validator, completed security audits, and integration by major exchanges. ^[13][4]

The mainnet launched on May 5, 2025 at 9am CEST. The Stardust mainnet and the IOTA EVM were shut down simultaneously, a genesis ceremony was run by the IOTA Foundation and 12 other validators, and the Stardust ledger was snapshotted into Move objects. No token migration was required: the same keys controlled the same balances on the new chain. ^{[15][14][16][43]}

How the protocol is governed today

Protocol changes are proposed as IOTA Improvement Proposals (IIPs) in a public GitHub repository, moving from Draft to Proposed (working on a test network) to Active (supported on mainnet). At the time of writing the Active IIPs included IIP-2 (Starfish consensus), IIP-3 (sequencer improvements) and IIP-8 (dynamic minimum validator commission); IIP-9 (abstract accounts) and IIP-12 (Starfish Speed) were Proposed. A new protocol version takes effect when a Byzantine fault tolerant supermajority of validators agrees to it. ^[20][10]

5. The technology, explained simply

From Tangle to objects

The old IOTA used a UTXO model on a DAG of transactions. Rebased replaced this with an object model: every coin, NFT or piece of application state is an object with an owner, and smart contracts written in Move operate on those objects. Move was designed to make assets hard to duplicate or lose by accident, and supports static and formal verification. Transaction fees and staking rewards are denominated in IOTA; the token has nine decimals, the smallest unit being the NANO, so Stardust balances were multiplied by 1,000 during migration. ^[12][4][7]

Two paths to finality

Not every transaction needs the whole network to agree on ordering. If a transaction touches only objects you own, validators can verify and sign it independently; once a supermajority has signed, the client holds a certificate and the transaction executes without waiting for global consensus. Transactions that touch shared objects, such as a liquidity pool, go through the consensus layer, which orders them with everyone else's. Either way, a second round of validator signatures on the execution result forms an "effects certificate," which the documentation calls "evidence of settlement finality." ^[9][1]

Mysticeti, then Starfish

At launch the consensus protocol was Mysticeti, inherited from Sui; the whitepaper credits it with "sub-second transaction finality" and "over 50,000 transactions per second." Those are the Foundation's figures, not independent measurements. In April 2026 the Foundation replaced it with Starfish, its own protocol, activated on mainnet on April 23, 2026 after a testnet phase. Starfish uses an uncertified DAG in which validators propose blocks in parallel, splits transaction data into erasure-coded shards so nodes can rebuild missing data, reaches finality in three rounds of communication and tolerates up to one third of validators by stake being offline or malicious. ^{[1][19][8][20]}

Epochs, validators and staking

Time is divided into roughly 24-hour epochs. During an epoch the validator set and its voting power are fixed; at the boundary, pending stakes and unstakes are processed, rewards are paid and the committee is recomputed from delegated stake. A candidate needs at least 2 million IOTA in its pool to join, falls into a seven-epoch grace period below 1.5 million and is removed below 1 million. Any validator's voting power is capped at 10 percent, with excess stake redistributed. Validators keep a commission (the whitepaper sets a maximum of 20 percent) and pass the rest to delegators in proportion to their stake; poorly performing validators receive only a fraction of the epoch's rewards. ^{[10][5][1][6]}

At the time of writing the mainnet reported 62 active validators, 8 candidates waiting to join and a cap of 150. The largest pool, Kiln, held about 267 million IOTA, which the 10 percent cap limits in voting power; the ten largest pools together held about 48 percent of all stake; three pools named "IOTA 1", "IOTA 2" and "IOTA 3," which list iota.org as their project URL and appear to be run by the Foundation (this attribution is inferred, not stated by the chain), held about 190 million IOTA together, roughly 8 percent of stake, and Binance operated a pool of about 143 million. These numbers change every epoch; check the explorer for current values. ^[2][3]

Fees, burning and sponsored transactions

Every transaction pays a computation fee at a reference gas price of 1,000 NANOS per unit, about 0.005 IOTA for an average transfer, and this portion is burned. Objects that take up storage require a deposit that is refunded when the object is deleted. Users may add a tip, which goes to validators. Developers can run a self-hosted "Gas Station" to pay fees on behalf of their users, so an application can feel feeless; the Foundation states that it "does not run a network-wide or app-specific Gas Station service." ^{[12][1][41][4]}

The code

The node software lives in the open-source iotaledger/iota repository under Apache-2.0 and CC-BY-4.0 licenses, and the Foundation has said openly that the protocol "uses a protocol based on Sui as its base." There is a single production implementation; we found no independent client. The IOTA Foundation also maintains the IOTA Identity library (decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials) and IOTA Notarization, which was labelled Alpha at the time of writing. ^{[21][12][39][40]}

6. The token

Supply: uncapped but predictable

The Rebased mainnet started with exactly 4,600,000,000 IOTA migrated from Stardust. At the end of each epoch 767,000 IOTA are minted and distributed as staking rewards, which the whitepaper calls "an initial annual minting rate of 6%," or at most 279,955,000 IOTA per 365 epochs. Because the per-epoch number is fixed, the percentage falls as supply grows. Fees are burned, so the whitepaper says total supply "is not capped" but its growth "is designed to remain at most linear." ^[1][7]

Reading the table: the supply at the time of writing is consistent with roughly 767,000 IOTA minted per day for about 17 months, with only a small fraction offset by burned fees. The current annual issuance is therefore about 280 million IOTA, roughly 5.6 percent of the supply at the time of writing. ^[1][2]

What IOTA is for

The documentation lists four uses: paying gas for transactions and storage, staking in delegated proof of stake, transferring value within applications, and voting on on-chain matters such as protocol upgrades. In practice staking dominates: about 48 percent of all IOTA was delegated at the time of writing. ^[7][2]

Distribution and vesting

The 2023 Stardust decision is the key to understanding who holds IOTA. Of the 4.6 billion total, about 2.53 billion belonged to existing holders, about 176 million were unclaimed Chrysalis-era tokens, and about 1.82 billion were newly created for the Ecosystem Fund: 552 million each to the Tangle Ecosystem Association and the UAE DLT Foundation, about 325 million to the IOTA Foundation, 230 million to contributors and 161 million to Assembly stakers. Most of these tranches unlocked 10 percent at once and the rest every two weeks over four years. The whitepaper confirms the end point: circulating and total supply become equal on September 29, 2027, when the last 12,370,411 IOTA tranche unlocks. ^[30][1]

We could not find a published treasury report showing how much the IOTA Foundation, the Tangle Ecosystem Association or the DLT Foundation hold or have spent at the time of writing; the Rebased launch post says their treasuries were moved to a third-party custodian with new addresses. Treat the Foundation-linked share as "up to about 40 percent of the 2023 supply, less whatever has been spent," not as a precise number. ^[15][30]

7. Real adoption

We separate three kinds of evidence: live production usage that an outsider can check, announcements and pilots, and narratives that are not verified.

8. The ISO 20022 connection

ISO 20022 is a messaging standard for financial institutions: a shared dictionary and structure for payment instructions used by SWIFT and by domestic payment systems. It describes how a bank formats a message, and it is not a certification that a blockchain can earn. Our ISO 20022 explainer covers the standard itself.

IOTA appears on many "ISO 20022 coin" lists alongside XRP, XLM, XDC, ALGO and HBAR. We traced one widely copied example: a hardware wallet vendor's blog, dated December 2024 and updated June 2026, that says "eight crypto coins already meet the ISO 20022 standard," names IOTA, and provides no ISO or IOTA Foundation source for the claim. The same article concedes that "cryptocurrencies have no official ISO body certification." ^[58]

The honest framing: IOTA's current strategy is about trade documents, not interbank payments. If an ISO 20022 message ever touched the IOTA ledger, it would do so inside a bank's or a customs system's integration layer, not in the protocol. That is compatible with, but very different from, being "an ISO 20022 coin." ^[36][37]

9. Ecosystem and competitors

Inside the ecosystem

The Foundation's "trust framework" consists of IOTA Identity (decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, with SD-JWT support added in version 1.9 in 2026), IOTA Notarization (timestamped records and audit trails, in Alpha), the Gas Station for sponsored fees, IOTA Names (launched on mainnet in Q1 2026) and Account Abstraction (live on mainnet in Q2 2026, enabling custom sign-in logic). ^{[39][40][41][18][19]}

The IOTA EVM is a Layer 2 chain with chain ID 8822 that launched on June 4, 2024 with Stargate, LayerZero, Pyth and Supra as partners, was shut down and restarted on the day of the Rebased launch, and is reached from MetaMask or Rabby. Assets move between Layer 1 and the EVM through the official IOTA EVM Bridge. The Foundation's long-term plan is a "MultiVM" ledger with the EVM supported natively on Layer 1. ^{[33][34][15][11]}

Developer activity is harder to measure than for older ecosystems. The Foundation's own reports count a Moveathon with 427 participants in Q2 2025 and a hackathon with more than 60 team submissions in Q1 2026; third-party wallets Nightly and Cosmostation added IOTA support in 2025. ^[17][18]

Competitors

Sui. The most direct comparison, because IOTA's node software is derived from Sui's: same object model, same Move language, a consensus lineage that started with Mysticeti. Sui has a far larger application and liquidity base; IOTA's differentiation is its trade and identity partnerships and its own consensus work (Starfish). A builder choosing between the two is choosing between ecosystem size and institutional relationships. ^[12][59][8]

Enterprise and supply chain chains. Hedera targets enterprises with a council-governed network, and XDC Network targets trade finance with a public-permissioned design. Both compete for the same customs authorities, banks and logistics firms that TWIN courts. ^[36][37]

Non-crypto incumbents. The strongest competitor for TLIP and TWIN is not a blockchain: it is the national single-window system each country already runs, and the private port community systems TWIN is trying to integrate with. TWIN's bet is that it can connect these rather than replace them. ^[36][37]

Payment and settlement chains. XRP and Stellar solve a different problem (moving money) and are not direct competitors for IOTA's trade-document niche, despite appearing on the same "ISO 20022" lists. ^[58]

10. Regulation and legal history

Legal entities

The IOTA Foundation is a German Stiftung, a non-profit under German law registered in Berlin in 2017 and listed in the EU Transparency Register. The IOTA Ecosystem DLT Foundation is registered under Abu Dhabi Global Market's DLT Foundations Regulations since November 2023, a regime in which the ADGM registration authority approved the entity; ADGM's own release notes the announcement is a third-party statement. The Tangle Ecosystem Association is a third Foundation-linked entity that holds Stardust allocations and runs a genesis validator. ^{[23][42][31][32][30][14]}

European Union

The Foundation engages actively with EU regulators: it submitted a response to the European Supervisory Authorities' consultation on MiCA Article 97 classification guidelines on October 11, 2024, signed by board member Dr. Anja Raden; joined a joint response to the UK FCA on staking and DeFi with the Sui, Cardano and Avalanche foundations; became a partner of Stand with Crypto EU; and submitted feedback on OECD CARF implementation. We did not find a MiCA white paper for the IOTA token in ESMA's interim register (last updated 2026-10-07), nor a regulator statement classifying it. ^[61] IOTA trades on Bitpanda, which describes itself as an Austria-based, European-regulated broker. ^[42][18][52]

United States

We found no SEC enforcement action or court ruling that names IOTA. IOTA is also not among the examples of digital commodities in the SEC's March 2026 interpretive release, which notes that an asset need not be listed to be one, so the omission is not a classification. ^[60] We also found no listing on Coinbase or Kraken: at the time of writing neither exchange's public asset list included IOTA (Coinbase's list includes IOTX, which is a different project). US retail access therefore runs through other venues, and the legal status of IOTA in the United States is undetermined rather than clarified. ^[57][56]

Exchange availability

At the time of writing IOTA traded on Binance (which also runs a mainnet validator), Bitfinex (which has listed it since 2017 under the ticker IOT), Bitpanda, KuCoin, Bybit and Bithumb in Korea. Deposits and withdrawals were paused around the Rebased launch and exchanges had to integrate the new chain, one of the Foundation's four preconditions for launch. ^{[51][2][50][52][53][54][55][15][13]}

Litigation history

The Trinity theft of February 2020 was reported to the FBI and European police forces according to the Foundation. We found no court judgment against the Foundation and no securities action involving the token. The 2017 Curl dispute involved legal threats against academic researchers but, as far as we could verify, no filed suit. ^[25][22][24]

11. Key risks

A young chain with a long history. The current mainnet has existed since May 2025. Everything before it, including the Coordinator era, Chrysalis and Stardust, was a different ledger with different rules. Three breaking migrations in four years is a record of adaptability and also a record of instability. ^[15][28][29]

Dependence on an upstream codebase. IOTA's node software is derived from Sui. That gave it a mature virtual machine quickly, but it means IOTA inherits Sui's bugs and must either track or fork its upstream. There is one implementation and no independent client. ^[12][21]

Validator and stake concentration. 62 validators secure the network, the ten largest pools hold about 48 percent of stake, and the Foundation and Binance each run pools among the largest. The 10 percent voting-power cap limits any single operator, but a coordinated third of stake could halt the chain by design. ^[2][1][8]

Supply dilution. 767,000 IOTA are created every day. Holders who do not stake are diluted by about 5.6 percent a year at the time of writing; holders who stake earn a share, net of the validator's commission, at the cost of trusting a validator's performance. The supply was also increased by Foundation decision in 2023. ^[1][30][6]

Foundation concentration and transparency. Foundation-linked entities received about 40 percent of the 2023 supply, vesting until September 2027, and we found no published treasury report. The Foundation writes nearly all the code and proposes most IIPs. ^[30][1][20]

Delivery history. The Coordinator was described as temporary in 2017 and lasted until 2025. IOTA 2.0, the subject of 65 research papers, was abandoned for an external codebase. Assembly, a token that users staked for, was cancelled. Each decision had reasons; together they mean roadmaps should be read as intentions. ^[11][30][22]

Wallet and migration risk. The Trinity hack showed that a wallet's third-party dependency can empty seeds. Today's migration path has its own traps: Firefly no longer works, legacy Chrysalis-era addresses may not be recognized by new wallets, and the legacy migration tool was deprecated in July 2025 and re-enabled in 2026. ^{[25][4][30][18]}

Adoption that may not need the token. TWIN is open-source infrastructure and fees can be sponsored by application operators. If trade agencies adopt TWIN while holding no IOTA, the link between usage and token demand runs only through the sponsor's gas bill, which is small by design. ^[35][41][12]

Market risk. IOTA has a long record of large price swings in both directions; the live chart in chapter 16 shows the recent range. ^[51]

This page is educational and is not investment advice.

12. Bull case vs bear case

The bull case

Supporters argue that IOTA finally has the architecture it lacked for a decade: a permissionless Layer 1 with Move smart contracts, sub-second finality according to the Foundation, fees low enough for applications to sponsor, and its own consensus research now running on mainnet in Starfish. On top of that sits something few chains have: a trade digitization foundation whose members include the World Economic Forum and the Tony Blair Institute, a program with Kenya's revenue authority that runs from 2016 to 2030, UK government border trials, and an Abu Dhabi foundation seeded with more than 100 million dollars in tokens vesting over four years. Almost half the supply is staked, which supporters read as holder commitment, and because issuance is a fixed amount per day, the rate declines in percentage terms every year. ^{[1][19][35][36][37][32][2]}

The bear case

Skeptics reply that IOTA's chain is a 17-month-old derivative of Sui competing against Sui itself, with a fraction of the applications and liquidity. The adoption story is real but token-light: open-source nodes, sponsored fees and no published volumes. Supply grows by 280 million IOTA a year, Foundation-linked entities still hold a large vesting share, and there is no treasury reporting. The project's history includes a network halt, a wallet hack, a founder's removal, a cancelled token and an abandoned multi-year protocol. Its listings do not include the main US regulated exchanges. ^{[12][59][41][1][30][25][27][11][56][57]}

Both cases rest on verifiable facts; they differ on whether institutional trade partnerships will translate into demand for the token. The reader decides.

What both sides can monitor

Several things can be checked over time. One is whether TLIP and TWIN publish volumes for documents or shipments processed on-chain. Another is stake concentration among the largest validator pools. A third is the vesting of Foundation-linked allocations, which runs to September 2027, and whether a treasury report appears. A fourth is whether major US regulated exchanges list the token. ^{[18][19][2][1][30][56][57]}

13. Scorecard

Scores follow the rubric used for every coin on this site; the rationale for each category is shown in the card.

14. How to buy and store

Before the exchange and wallet list, the IOTA-specific pitfalls. Most of them come from the May 2025 relaunch.

1. Firefly is dead; the official wallet is a browser extension. The Foundation's FAQ says Firefly "is deprecated and doesn't support the new Mainnet." The official replacement is the IOTA Wallet extension, published on the Chrome Web Store by the IOTA Ecosystem DLT Foundation (version 1.11.0, last updated October 1, 2026, about 30,000 users at the time of writing). Install it only from the Chrome Web Store link on iota.org, never from a search ad. The extension imports a mnemonic, a private key or a Stronghold file from Firefly or Bloom, and its Balance Finder scans for all your old addresses. ^{[4][46][16][15]}

2. Your address changed shape. Stardust addresses began with "iota1" (Bech32). Rebased keeps the same underlying 32-byte key hash but "deprecates the Bech32 format": addresses are now 0x followed by 64 hexadecimal characters. Your old keys still control your coins, and simple IOTA balances were available immediately after the snapshot; NFTs, aliases and time-locked assets had to be claimed with the "Start Migration" button in the Wallet Dashboard. If someone asks you to send to an "iota1..." address, that is a pre-2025 format and your wallet should refuse it. ^[44][43][4]

3. Legacy addresses from before 2021. Accounts from the Chrysalis-era rotating-address scheme are called "legacy." The Foundation warns these "may not be recognized by newer wallets" and recommends moving funds out of them; the Archived Explorer can show past balances. The legacy migration tool was deprecated in July 2025 with claims handled manually by email, then re-enabled on mainnet in Q1 2026. If you hold coins from a 2017-2020 seed, expect a manual process and start with the official docs, not a helper in a chat group. ^[4][30][18]

4. Ledger: yes, through the IOTA Wallet extension. The Foundation's Ledger guide lists the IOTA app for Ledger Nano S Plus and Nano X (minimum app version 0.9.3) and Ledger Flex and Stax (1.0.0), installed from Ledger Live's app catalog and used together with the IOTA Wallet extension, which can hold up to 10 Ledger accounts. The Ledger Nano S "reached its end of life in June 2022"; its app (0.9.2) must be installed manually and the docs say to "carry out the manual installation at your own risk." Ledger's own IOTA page is less specific: it mentions only MetaMask as a companion wallet, which is the EVM path, so do not rely on Ledger's page alone for Layer 1 instructions. The open-source app is published by LedgerHQ and lists Nano S Plus, Nano X, Nano Gen5, Flex and Stax. ^{[45][48][47][46]}

5. Trezor: EVM only, not Layer 1. Trezor's IOTA page lists Safe 3, Safe 5 and Safe 7, says IOTA is "not supported in Trezor Suite," names MetaMask and Rabby as companion apps, and lists exactly one supported network: "Iota EVM." We found no Trezor support for IOTA on the Layer 1 network at the time of writing. If you want a hardware wallet for Layer 1 IOTA, that means Ledger. ^[49]

6. Fees and staking basics. Keep a little IOTA unstaked for fees: an average transfer costs about 0.005 IOTA, and the minimum gas budget is 0.001 IOTA. Staking is self-custodial, you can switch validators or unstake at any time, and rewards count only for epochs in which your stake was active for the whole 24 hours. Validators can change their commission "at any time without notice," so check it periodically. ^{[4][1][6][62]}

15. Sources

16. Live chart

The chart below shows the live IOTA price; everything above it was checked at the time of writing.