IOTA Rebased is the protocol overhaul that went live on mainnet on 5 May 2025. It retired the Tangle as IOTA’s ledger and replaced it with a Move-based object ledger, delegated proof-of-stake consensus, and real transaction fees. The architecture is derived from the same Mysten Labs research lineage as Sui — IOTA effectively rebased its mainnet onto that stack, hence the name.

What Changed#

Pre-Rebased (Tangle) Rebased (May 2025+)
Ledger DAG of transactions Object ledger on the Move VM
Consensus Tip approval + Coordinator milestones Mysticeti dPoS, no Coordinator
Validators Foundation Coordinator Up to ~150 permissionless, staked
Fees None ~0.005 IOTA per tx, burned
Finality Probabilistic (cumulative weight) Deterministic, sub-second
L1 smart contracts None Native Move

Object Model and the Move VM#

Instead of accounts-with-balances (Ethereum) or unspent outputs (Bitcoin, legacy IOTA), state is a set of typed objects owned by addresses. Smart contracts are Move modules; assets are Move resources — values the type system forbids from being copied or implicitly dropped, which structurally prevents whole classes of double-spend and accounting bugs.

Because transactions declare the objects they touch, the runtime can execute non-overlapping transactions in parallel rather than strictly serialising every transaction as the EVM does. This is the main throughput lever in the new design.

Mysticeti Consensus and dPoS#

Rebased uses Mysticeti, a DAG-based BFT consensus. Validators are elected by stake; IOTA holders who do not run infrastructure delegate their stake to validators and share in rewards — the standard delegated-PoS pattern. The Foundation-run Coordinator is gone, which is the decentralisation milestone the Coordicide programme had promised for years.

Published figures: 50,000+ TPS capacity and finality on the order of 400–500 ms. Treat these as benchmark/target numbers, as with any L1’s headline throughput.

Fees and Tokenomics#

IOTA is no longer strictly feeless. Each transaction costs roughly 0.005 IOTA on average, and that fee is burned, applying deflationary pressure. Fees are framed as a congestion-control mechanism, not a revenue model — they are deliberately tiny, and applications can sponsor fees so end users still experience a feeless flow.

Staking is inflationary to fund rewards: on the order of 767,000 IOTA minted per epoch, an initial inflation rate near 6%, distributed to validators and their delegators. Net token supply pressure is the burn rate against this issuance.

Relationship to IOTA EVM#

Rebased did not replace IOTA EVM. The EVM chain continues to run as a Layer 2 alongside the new Move Layer 1, bridged for asset transfers. The Foundation has stated an intent to integrate EVM execution into Layer 1 in future, but as of the Rebased mainnet they remain distinct environments — Move for L1-native development, EVM for Solidity portability.

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