The launch of ShimmerEVM kick-starts smart contracts in the IOTA ecosystem

BERLIN. September 28, 2023 – Following the success of the ShimmerEVM test chain, IOTA, the open, feeless, and highly scalable distributed ledger technology (DLT) for the digital economy, is debuting the first public IOTA Smart Contracts (ISC) chain on a network with an actual token.

Running on Shimmer, the staging network for IOTA, ShimmerEVM serves an important purpose: to strengthen and validate that what IOTA has built over the years functions as designed and intended, and to bring utility to the Shimmer network. It aims to address the pain points prevalent on other smart contract platforms while also enabling IOTA-based assets to function on any of these chains. With this initial chain established, IOTA is validating its solution and setting the stage for more chains to launch in a permissionless manner, a concept that has been integral to its original design from the outset. 

As mentioned, this signifies the launch of IOTA’s smart contract software on a platform other than a testnet and inherits all ISC’s included features. ISC is a heavily maintained product with ever-improving features which will be brought to Shimmer and ShimmerEVM first, once available. 

The most important features of ShimmerEVM include:

• EVM Compatible: Users can run contracts from other chains with minimal to no adjustments.

• Extended EVM functionality: These so-called ‘magic smart contracts’ allow users to interact with native assets and NFTs from Layer 1, utilize native randomness, and communicate with other chains anchored to Shimmer.

• MEV protection: The leaderless consensus ensures random ordering of the transactions in a block to better protect users against sandwich attacks and other MEV techniques.

• L1 Native Asset support: Users can effortlessly send SMR tokens (and in the future NFTs and custom Native Assets) to the ShimmerEVM through Firefly, no special bridge needed.

• Node support: Next to the validator nodes ShimmerEVM supports (pruning) access nodes and (non-pruning) archive nodes allowing qualified node operators from projects to run their own nodes to their demands on request.

• Further features ISC brings: Custom APIs will be offered, as well as metadata functionality, a CLI, a set of core contracts including account and governance functionality for the chain, and much more.

To kickstart development, the IOTA Foundation is launching the ShimmerEVM as a public chain, guaranteeing the highest possible QoS, availability, and reliability. Yet, over time, the IOTA Foundation will hand control of the ShimmerEVM chain over to its community. In order to decentralize the chain further, a supermajority of validators will gradually be given to the community. 

Shimmer is the ideal platform to develop dApps and test out new functions in order to perfect them. Over fifty are ready to be deployed to the ecosystem ranging from DeFi, gaming, and decentralized exchanges, to lending markets and yield aggregators:

• ShimmerSea: Primary decentralized exchange

• Virtue: Shimmer $vUSD stablecoin

• Deepr Finance: Lending market

• Accumulator: Yield aggregator

• Soonaverse: NFT marketplace

• Genie’s Bounty: Trustless casino

“Several years ago, we began our journey to support smart contracts on Shimmer and IOTA,” said Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder of IOTA and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation. “We've collaborated with other projects to ensure we are as compatible with other EVM technologies as possible while preserving the unique properties that set us apart. We also collaborated extensively with developers launching dApps and with the broader community. Our collective efforts have brought us to this significant milestone: the launch of the first public ISC chain on a network with an actual token – the debut of ShimmerEVM.

You can find more details in the blog post here.