• The introduction of $SOON staking last week has boosted massive network activity on the Shimmer network.
• The IOTA’s Shimmer Network plays a crucial role in the roadmap of transition to IOTA 2.0.

IOTA unveiled its incentivized Layer 1 innovation network Shimmer earlier this year in late September 2022. Since then, the Shimmer Network has witnessed strong network activity and has become the go-to platform for IOTA developers to test out new features for future innovations and the Web3.

Last week, decentralized NFT marketplace Soonaverse introduced the staking feature for its native token $SOON on the Shimmer Network. Soonaverse announced that users who stake their $SOON tokens will get discounts on service modules along with receiving additional $SOONs as a reward for locking up their tokens.

Five days into the launch, the $SOON staking has already fueled network activity on the Shimmer network.

Earlier this year in September, the decentralized NFT marketplace had already tested the minting of NFTs on the Shimmer Network. The Soonaverse team tested the migration of nearly 450,000+ NFTs to the Shimmer platform.

By leveraging IOTA’s feeless infrastructure, the Soonaverse platform allows communities to build NFT marketplaces, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), projects, companies, etc.

The shimmer Network offers a unique staking and locking mechanism for $SOON holders. For staking, users won’t need to send their tokens to a smart contract. Instead, they just need to specify the number of tokens they want to stake and the duration involved. These tokens shall appear automatically in your wallet with a time expiry condition. Despite staking the $SOON tokens, they remain 100% in the user’s control.

$SOON holders get the flexibility to stake anywhere between the one-week to 52-week period.

IOTA 2.0 – Coordicide

As we know, the IOTA Foundation has been working actively for the development of IOTA 2.0 also known as IOTA Coordicide. This is a crucial step for the IOTA protocol in realizing the dream of a permissionless and scalable distributed ledger technology.

In the early stages of development, IOTA’s underlying data infrastructure – The Tangle – was secured by a temporary component known as the Coordinator. With Coordicide, IOTA has managed to remove the Coordinator replacing it with a new security mechanism that will allow IOTA to become fully decentralized.

The shimmer Network would play a key role in the transition to IOTA 2.0. It basically serves as a test network for developers before bringing any major upgrades to the IOTA mainnet.

Shimmer is also a DAG-based parallelized settlement layer with a higher L2 anchoring capacity. The Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is another form of blockchain technology that links individual transactions to multiple other transactions. As a result, the Shimmer Network helps in connecting and securing sovereign blockchains, applications, and ecosystems.

Distinct Native Tokenization, Customisability, Feeless Immutability, and Interoperability are some of the key features of the IOTA blockchain.