IOTA Sees 12% Price Surge As Founder Confirms EVM Release Date

The IOTA (IOTA) token has relished some major gains amid market uncertainty following a string of announcements from IOTA founder Dominik Schiener, 24 January 2023.

IOTA EVM due in March

During an ask-me-anything (AMA) with KuCoin on Twitter Spaces, Solana, and IOTA, the IOTA founder

[ICYMI] What happened at yesterday's @kucoincom #AMA, featuring @DomSchiener, co-founder of #IOTA and @solana? Here's a thread covering key moments of this talk deep-diving into the protocols 🧵 ⬇️ . Thank you #Kucoin for hosting this talk 🙏 !

— IOTA (@iota) January 24, 2024

, amongst other things, that the IOTA Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) will be released on 31 March 2024. 

Additionally, Schiener reiterated IOTA’s focus on tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs), which are essential in bridging digital and physical worlds. In doing so, blockchain adoption and integration can become legitimized by moving from novel concepts to more tangible applications.

Furthermore, digital identities, trade logistics, and security are target areas for IOTA which is looking to establish itself as an essential Web3 infrastructure for real-world institutions and entities. Schiener also notes that IOTA is now working on becoming a Web3 competitor, and has planned expansions into Korea, Japan, and Singapore.

Schiener hints at some very large announcements to come regarding governments adopting and implementing IOTA, as well as tokenization deals where they’ll hopefully be “onboarding hundreds of millions of dollars of assets to IOTA” and “offer those yield-bearing assets to our ecosystem.”

He also noted that stakeholders should stake their IOTA tokens in the IOTA EVM during Q1 or early Q2 to be eligible for airdrops.

IOTA 2.0

The IOTA Foundation has been steadily working away at its second iteration, IOTA 2.0, for some time now, officially introducing the project in late 2023, and the IOTA EVM is perhaps one of the biggest steps towards that aim. Not only will this make IOTA a more user-friendly platform, it’s Layer-1 capabilities will also expand as IOTA-based projects can now seamlessly interact with the Ethereum ecosystem.

The overhaul is set to bring dozens of upgrades to the network that will further IOTA’s aims of building an ecosystem where the concepts of digital autonomy, accessibility, security, token sustainability, and efficiency are paramount.

IOTA price

The news certainly sparked renewed interest in the IOTA token, which saw its 24-hour gains peak at over 12% from around $0.21 to $0.25. Furthermore, this added around $100m to IOTA’s market capitalization. The IOTA token is currently trading at $0.24.

2024 vision

Looking ahead, IOTA, like other major networks such as Ethereum (ETH), Immutable (IMX), and Solana (SOL), has a pretty big year ahead with many other major Web3 competitors set to drop bombshell announcements and developments through the year.

Now with the crypto markets setting their eyes on Bitcoin (BTC) and the upcoming halving, altcoins are preparing to launch their newest technologies ahead of this huge event in hopes of being perfectly positioned for the outcome.