• A director at IOTA Foundation said that SMR-based NFTs would help to solve the issue of fees for NFT transfers.
• IOTA’s Layer-1 incentivized network Shimmer doesn’t charge any fee for SMR transactions on the blockchain.

Tech giant Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has been recently in the news with app developers complaining over the hefty 30 percent fees that it charges to all transactions done through apps available on the App Store. This has proved to be a major reason for the scuffle between Apple and the crypto exchange Coinbase.

On Thursday, December 1, crypto exchange Coinbase announced that it was forced to disable NFT transfers on its iOS wallet app. This was following a major dispute with Apple over the tech giant’s in-app purchase policy.

In a series of Tweets, Coinbase said that Apple is demanding them to pay the gas fee for using the Apple software. This means that the gas fee paid through the Coinbase wallet app on iOS would be subject to a 30 percent Apple tax. The official handle of Coinbase wallet added:

For anyone who understands how NFTs and blockchains work, this is clearly not possible. Apple’s proprietary In-App Purchase system does not support crypto so we couldn’t comply even if we tried. This is akin to Apple trying to take a cut of fees for every email that gets sent over open Internet protocols.

Coinbase said that the policy change will impact iPhone users the most, who use NFTs. Thus, users holding an NFT in a wallet on iPhone will have to think twice before transferring their NFTs as it would attract a hefty tax. Lashing out at Apple, Coinbase said: “Apple has introduced new policies to protect their profits at the expense of consumer investment in NFTs and developer innovation across the crypto ecosystem”.

Also read: IOTA partners with Zokyo to make Web3-billion-dollar-market more secure and transparent

IOTA offers a solution to this

As the controversy triggered on Thursday, Navin Ramachandran, who sits on the board of directors for the IOTA Foundation offered a solution. In his tweet on Thursday, Navin wrote:

This would not be an issue with $SMR based NFTs. Can you guess why? No fee for minting. No fee for transfer. # Only refundable storage deposits. #shimmer #iota

IOTA launched its Layer-1 Shimmer Network two months back in later September 2022. Shimmer is the incentivized Layer 1 innovation network, built to fuel the growth of feeless and highly interoperable digital assets and token economies. As a staging network, Shimmer helps to test new features and innovations before they land on the IOTA mainnet.

SMR is the native cryptocurrency of the Shimmer Network. Since the Shimmer network doesn’t charge any transaction fee for $SMR transactions, Navin was suggesting that SMR-based NFTs could help to solve the issue Coinbase is facing.