Iota launches beta smart contracts to foster interoperability

Published at: Oct. 21, 2021

The Iota Foundation has announced the release of its beta version smart contract functionality, with the objective to solve market challenges of scalability limitations and high transaction fees, as well as reportedly debuting components not witnessed thus far in the space.

Iota’s nonprofit foundation is focused on open-source research and development initiatives to drive adoption in the distributed ledger technology space, alongside its native platform, the Tangle.

The smart contract service will foster interoperability and standardization through the integration of Ethereum Virtual Machine; multi-capacity for developers to write program languages with Tiny Go, Rust, and Ethereum’s Solidity; as well as enabling developers to mark unique execution fees, among other features.

The latter is a prominent difference from the Ethereum blockchain and could drastically foster the reduction of fees across the network, as the pool of competitors seeking to validate the smart contract increases.

In March, the platform announced the release of its alpha Iota Smart Contracts Protocol, designed to encourage developers to build smart contracts in addition to decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) applications.

Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chairman of the Iota Foundation, told Cointelegraph that the addition of smart contract functionality will “add a vital component to the Iota ecosystem. They allow anyone to build composable and complex dApps using industry standard Ethereum tooling while relying on a feeless base layer and predictable, low execution fees.”

“IOTA Smart Contracts also enable the feeless transfer of assets across chains, which offers the IOTA ecosystem — and anyone else interested — unprecedented opportunities in terms of utility, composability, and scalability,” Schiener said.

Schiener claimed that Iota smart contracts are unique in that they offer low, predictable, transparent fees, adding: “Smart contract chains enjoy permissionless deployment, without setup fees, auctions, or gatekeepers of any kind. The smart contract execution fees are predictable, non-volatile, and entirely up to the chain owner to set."

“The possibility for chains to compete for the ‘work’ of executing a smart contract creates an additional incentive to push execution fees to their absolute minimum — including zero. Non-zero fees are payable in whatever form the chain owner demands, giving additional flexibility. In a nutshell, it is a DeFi operator’s ‘wet dream’.”