Hassan Maishera
On Friday, the IOTA team announced via a blog post that the IOTA Mainnet has undergone a major consensus upgrade, adopting Starfish from the testnet.
By redesigning how consensus progresses during delays, Starfish makes the network less dependent on perfect synchronization, meaning temporary disruptions don’t cause system-wide slowdowns and recovery occurs naturally as part of normal operations.
The Starfish upgrade allows the network to continue functioning even when some participants are temporarily unreachable or operate intermittently, much like how a starfish can regenerate from a single arm without dying. This means recovery happens independently, while the rest of the system continues to function smoothly.
Starfish maintains network continuity by decoupling consensus progress from validator synchronization, enabling lagging nodes to rejoin without interrupting others.
IOTA is a permissionless distributed ledger "for a new economy." IOTA aims to support the growth of a machine economy by enabling "fee-less machine-to-machine payments," offering greater scalability than blockchain networks.
IOTA is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) with an open-source product suite for individuals, businesses, and institutions in Web3. Founded in 2015, it enables low-fee, permissionless value and data transfer on a scalable, decentralized network.
As a pioneer in using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) in the DLT and blockchain space, IOTA stands out as one of the first networks to integrate the Move programming language — a language specifically designed for secure and predictable digital asset management. IOTA’s architecture blends a DAG-native consensus mechanism with an object-centric ledger model, enabling advanced programmability through Move smart contracts.
Unlike traditional blockchains, IOTA's DAG structure immediately includes transactions into blocks that reference previous blocks. This creates a causal architecture where each new block acknowledges the current ledger state. It removes the need for a shared mempool and eliminates any leader role for block proposals. As a result, IOTA enables low-latency confirmations, high throughput, and parallel block proposals — key features for decentralized finance (DeFi), where fairness and speed are essential, and for supply chain systems that demand scale, traceability, and minimal transaction costs.
IOTA is trading at $0.05561, up 1.5% in the last 24 hours.
