After two months of beta testing, the IOTA Foundation’s Shimmer Network launches on the main network today. Shimmer running at full capacity on the network will provide numerous opportunities to tokenize anything from real-world assets to fan tokens natively on the Layer 1 blockchain without any fees.
The Shimmer Network, at its core, is a Sandbox for IOTA community developers to test the effectiveness and compatibility of DeFi applications or NFT assets before launching them on the main IOTA network. The full launch of the Shimmer Network is an important part of the IOTA roadmap.
Users who received SMR tokens, the native Shimmer Network cryptocurrency, can also claim them today via Firefly Wallet. SMR is the Shimmer Network’s backbone, providing transaction value and allowing all decentralized applications, smart contracts, and other developers to run on Shimmer.
Following that, SMR is expected to be listed on major cryptocurrency platforms such as Bitfinex, which has become the token’s official launch partner.
IOTA is a distributed LEDGER based on Tangle technology, also known as the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). It represents a network in which all transactions can run concurrently and where each new transaction must validate the previous two. IOTA addresses the blockchain’s current problem of user-validator separation. There is only one role in the Tangle architecture: the user is also a validator.
