• The IOTA Foundation has announced the launch of Shimmer, a staging network that will incentivize an accelerated ecosystem growth like Kusama has done for Polkadot.
• Complete with its own $SMR token, Shimmer will debut various exciting features on smart contracts, DeFi, NFTs and more before they launch on the IOTA mainnet.

The IOTA Foundation has announced the upcoming launch of Shimmer, a staging network that will accelerate network upgrades on the IOTA ecosystem. Shimmer will allow developers to test various features and upgrades in an incentivized environment before they launch them on the mainnet. Co-founder Dominik Schiener has described Shimmer as “supercharging the innovation playground around IOTA.”

Shimmer, which will have its own native token known as $SMR, will offer the right token incentives to developers and users to test various features and functionalities before they launch on the mainnet. These will include the introduction of the IOTA Smart Contracts which will be blockchain-agnostic and fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Read More: It’s finally here! IOTA Foundation launches Smart Contracts Beta

The IOTA Foundation has also been working on full decentralization with the IOTA 2.0 Protocol, and this will also debut on Shimmer. This protocol, which introduces a leaderless consensus algorithm, is currently live on a public testnet.

The addition of tokenization on the IOTA base layer to make it a programmable multi-asset ledger, as well as sharding, will also be tested on the Shimmer network.

Shimmer makes IOTA a DeFi and NFT contender

The goal of the Shimmer staging network is to allow for faster and more aggressive growth of the IOTA network and give it an edge over other blockchain projects. Currently, users have to wait for polished and full-audited products to launch on the mainnet. This, while protecting the users, denies them the opportunity to explore some of the latest products and functionalities on blockchain projects.

Shimmer will “offer its community an entire ecosystem of applications aimed at being at the forefront of innovation.”

Feeless transactions will also debut on the network. This will include zero fees for minting and trading tokenized assets and NFTs. Sharded smart contracts will allow developers to define rewards to validators and will support a variety of programming languages including Ethereum’s Solidity, Rust and Go.

Dominik, the IOTA co-founder and chair of the IOTA Foundation, noted that this was an important milestone for the IOTA ecosystem. In a press release shared with CNF, he noted that the Shimmer network will do for IOTA what Kusama has done for Polkadot, “offering crucial testing and public validation to our ambitious development roadmap.” It will also accelerate IOTA’s path towards full decentralization, he added.

Introducing tokenization, complex output types, smart contracts and new consensus offers exciting new opportunities. These opportunities aren’t without significant risks, however, and Shimmer will ensure the safety of each upgrade. This also lets us offer our community early access in building new decentralized applications. With Shimmer, we are supercharging the innovation playground around IOTA.

Shimmer will be fully community-driven through the $SMR token. Holders will get to stake their tokens and earn 8 percent APY. It will launch in early 2022, with the Foundation focusing on public token distribution over the next three months.