Assembly announces sharded, composable smart contracts with optional zero fees to take Web3 and the Metaverse mainstream

BERLIN (December 2, 2021) – IOTA, one of the largest crypto-currencies in the world, announces the release of Assembly, a new decentralized layer-1 smart contract network with a native ASMB token. The Assembly mainnet will launch in 2022 as a permissionless network that will be fully governed by its community. 

In an unprecedented move, developers, creators, early participants and DAOs of the Assembly ecosystem will receive close to 70% of the entire ASMB token supply. The start of the open distribution of ASMB tokens will begin shortly, with the first airdrop to IOTA token holders. Upcoming token distributions will be voted on by the community and will be reserved for developers, early adopters and DAOs of the network.

The novel architecture of Assembly is based on the Smart Contracts framework of IOTA, which leverages the IOTA network as an immutable trust anchor and as a trustless bridge for feeless interoperability between smart contracts. On Assembly, developers enjoy the flexibility to customize and launch their own smart contract chains while benefiting from the shared security of the entire network. Thanks to IOTA’s directed acyclic graph structure, smart contracts can be executed in parallel, turning Assembly into a sharded network able to scale horizontally while maintaining security, interoperability, and composability.

Assembly provides a fully decentralized validator marketplace, creating an environment in which smart contract chains can economically compete with each other through their properties and fee schedules. Validators can be incentivized through unique reward structures, including fixed-fee payments in stablecoins and more creative token distributions of native tokens. Assembly has created a network with fixed fees as low as $0 thanks to the flexibility to individually define execution fees for smart contracts. With these innovations, Assembly offers builders a powerful toolset to eliminate existing barriers to entry and bring the next billion users to crypto.

Assembly’s combined characteristics will supercharge smart contract development in its various forms, including DeFi and NFTs, and create an open and interoperable decentralized economy. Many of the current bottlenecks of other networks have been addressed, including MEV (Miner Extractable Value) which is no longer possible on the Assembly network. Instead of thinking of Assembly as an Ethereum killer, imagine instead a future of co-existence and cooperation. Developers accustomed to writing smart contracts in Solidity and who prefer Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) will not have to switch methods but will enjoy full compatibility to the existing and well-established infrastructure. 

Assembly will invite all developers to its ecosystem, regardless of their native language, asset type, or virtual machine. Assembly will inherit the ability to spawn different but interoperable virtual machines, starting with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and smart contracts written in either Solidity, Rust or Go (TinyGo) – both based on WebAssembly/Wasm – as well as Typescript. Support for even more languages is on the way. 

Assembly offers limitless opportunities and unique technical features for dApp developers and innovators who were previously limited by traditional blockchains’ costs and throughput caps. Assembly’s vision is to fully realize the potential of decentralized technologies and offer a technology framework and a public network for mainstream adoption. With plans to distribute up to 70% of the entire token supply to the community’s most dedicated builders and innovators, Assembly will evolve into one of the biggest crypto ecosystems. 

A list of unique features of Assembly: 

• Fast and reliably cheap smart contracts: An obvious competitive advantage of Assembly is that smart contracts are quick and cheap to execute. Validators are able to set competitively low (or no) fees due to the underlying feeless structure of the IOTA Tangle. 

• Trustless and feeless smart contract interoperability with atomic composability, enabling assets and data to be moved across chains. 

• Flexible development environment to build dApps tailored to your needs. Assembly empowers developers to use their preferred language, VM, define execution fees for users and incentives for validators and their committee structures. We take dApp customization and composability to the next level, empowering builders with the right framework to scale and go mainstream.

• Scalability with the right incentives. Assembly is a sharded smart contract network, where each smart contract chain is limited only by its own scalability and is not hindered by the rest of the network. What makes this exciting is that each smart contract chain can define their own incentives and fees (potentially even feeless), enabling developers with new approaches and possibilities for dApp usability and UX.   

• EVM Compatible and WebAssembly. We will launch Assembly with full EVM-compatibility. This means that all Solidity smart contracts and all innovations built on Ethereum today can be ported over to the Assembly network easily. 

Instead of creating a walled garden where a few centralized companies control the internet’s decentralized future, Assembly is helping to undo the mistakes that were made with Web 2.0 by distributing power and ownership to its community. Assembly is taking Web 3.0 and the Metaverse mainstream by building an open, community-governed network.

“Assembly is a key component of our mission to build the decentralized economy,” said Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation. “It is a perfect illustration of democratic, inclusive, interoperable technology that harnesses the power of the decentralized, permissionless, and feeless Tangle to deliver unmatched performance and to move a whole ecosystem forward. With a spirit of inclusion, cooperation, and empowerment, we are transforming one more facet of digital life and inviting as many people as possible to join us.”

“In an environment that is fairly competitive and proprietary, we consciously aimed to make Assembly as inclusive and interoperable as possible,” said Navin Ramachandran, Member of the Board of Directors of the IOTA Foundation. “No single smart contract solution currently has the scalability and security that would enable mass adoption and innovation. With Assembly, we are bringing technology that supports a multitude of use cases, programming languages, and virtual machines, a solution that unifies a hitherto disjointed landscape. We are doing this out of a conviction that in the new digital economy, several cutting-edge technologies will coexist side-by-side, and IOTA with Assembly will serve as a vital bridge in the smart contracts space.”

Find out more about Assembly here:

• IOTA Smart Contracts Whitepaper: https://files.iota.org/papers/ISC_WP_Nov_10_2021.pdf

• IOTA Smart Contracts Beta release: https://blog.iota.org/iota-smart-contracts-beta-release/

• Github Development: https://github.com/iotaledger/wasp