IOTA Governance Vote Finalized: Rebased Protocol Upgrade Moves Forward

• IOTA has just concluded its governance voting on the Rebased Protocol with 98% of the participants supporting the upgrade. 
• Currently, partners and application builders are testing the new technology with many independent validators also onboarding to participate in the operational procedure.

IOTA (IOTA) recently subjected what could be the most important upgrade in its history (Rebased Protocol) to a governance vote. As we earlier reported, the process started on December 2 through December 17 with the voting prompt – “Do you support upgrading the IOTA Mainnet to the proposed IOTA Rebased Protocol?”

According to our research, the majority of the voters approved the upgrade with a voting percentage of 98.37%. Specifically, the IOTA Rebased received 31,647,575,919,696,580 “Yes” votes, with 1.48% (474,777,288,656,110) of the total participants voting against the upgrade. Meanwhile, 0.15% (48,806,799,459,141) of the qualified voters chose “Abstain”.

The biggest upgrade in IOTAs history has officially been approved by all token holders A complete overhaul of the L1 with many exciting new features such as $IOTA staking, MoveVM and full decentralization Now we prepare it all for mainnet release with our partners https://t.co/CQn59WtgoK— Dominik Schiener (@DomSchiener) December 19, 2024

Commenting on this in the latest blog post, IOTA highlighted that the responses from token holders give a glimpse of the brighter future that awaits the ecosystem.

The decision by IOTA token holders to follow the development path proposed by the IOTA Foundation and the overwhelming support and positive responses we’ve received over the past few weeks from our ecosystem and partners promise a bright future ahead. We welcome the mandate given to us by the IOTA community to steer the project in what we believe to be the right direction.

What is Next?

IOTA is currently working on the Rebased mainnet release. Meanwhile, the testnet is already live as partners and application builders test the new technology stack. According to the post, many independent validators are already onboarding to participate in this operational procedure. As we earlier disclosed, the validators currently unveiled by IOTA include:

• Cosmostation: a blockchain validator managing $1.5 billion in staked assets.
• Nodes.Guru: leading blockchain validator with more than $500 million in total assets staked.
• InfStones: top blockchain infrastructure provider that offers enterprise-grade Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions.
• Stakin: leading institutional-grade Web3 infrastructure and non-custodial staking service provider.
• BlockPI: the biggest professional infra provider in APAC.

Meanwhile, IOTA explains that four main conditions must be met for a smooth mainnet release. According to the report, there should be a minimum of two months testnet phase, which includes a thorough stress test. Also, security audits must be completed during the testnet phase. Additionally, the review of all validators on the testnet must be ready, and finally, IOTA Rebased must be integrated by major exchanges.

In a previous blog post, IOTA outlined some of the expected steps in the mainnet upgrade.

• Network transition.
• IOTA EVM Chain Pause.
• EVM Chain Upgrade.
• Wallet Transition.
• Token Continuity.
• Exchange support.

After the completion of the upgrade, users will witness low transaction costs and a fee-burning mechanism to control congestion and manage the supply.

At press time, IOTA was trading at $0.298 after declining by 8.8% in the last 24 hours.