This update covers July to September 2026, a quarter that made the IOTA network faster, easier to verify and simpler to run. It also brought new tools for developers and progress on trade.
Consensus: Starfish-Speed Reaches Mainnet
Starfish-Speed, an upgrade to the Starfish consensus protocol, is now live on mainnet. When network conditions allow, validators commit a block one round earlier, so transactions reach finality sooner. It ran on devnet in July and testnet in August before reaching mainnet in September.
Consensus, networking and the API services also went through security reviews during the quarter, and the resulting fixes have shipped to mainnet.
Work also continued on P-COOL, the certificate-less transaction flow that is the IOTA Core team's main focus in the next quarter, when stress testing on public networks is expected to start.
Node and Network Operations
Joining and running the network got faster and requires less trust. Nodes now bootstrap from formal snapshots that carry everything needed to verify them, so operators no longer have to rely on whoever published the snapshot. Formal snapshots are produced on testnet and mainnet at the latest epoch and at the start of each month, and they replace the public RocksDB snapshots, which have been discontinued. Node sync is 2.6 times faster, and a syncing node reports how far behind it is and when it will catch up.
Verification also reaches further back. Nodes now keep epoch information all the way to genesis, so light clients can verify the chain from genesis through any fullnode that serves the gRPC API.
Developer Tooling
Building on IOTA now starts from a stable SDK. The Rust SDK and its bindings for other languages reached their first beta, 1.0.0-beta.1, with documentation published for every language, and local transaction simulation now matches what the node returns. Move gained view functions, giving applications a cheap, safe way to read onchain data, with documentation, worked examples and support in the IOTA Move VS Code extension.
Everyday development also got lighter, with a much smaller dependency cache, an early warning when a package nears the size limit, and clearer error codes. IOTA's account abstraction model was presented at the 2026 International Conference on Blockchain Research and Applications.
Data Services and Infrastructure
The public Indexer now keeps 30 days of data by default, which keeps it lean while recent data stays fully queryable. Older data remains available for key lookups and for transactions that touched a specific IOTA address, which fall back to an archival store in both JSON-RPC and GraphQL. Other filtered queries on transactions and events are limited to the 30-day window.
Setting up an Indexer has also become faster. Operators can now restore one directly from a formal snapshot instead of replaying every checkpoint from genesis, with instructions in the IOTA docs. The public Indexer on mainnet now runs behind a load balancer, so it can be updated without interrupting the API.
For applications using the public endpoints, gRPC, Indexer and API endpoints on devnet, testnet and mainnet are now rate limited at 100 requests per second per IP. Applications with heavier traffic can run their own node or Indexer.
Explorer and Wallet
The IOTA Explorer now opens on a network analytics homepage. The account page leads with portfolio and activity, transaction pages are easier to read and filter, and known accounts are labeled. A new notarization page was added.
The IOTA Wallet gained a balance visibility toggle, an integrated dApp gallery, fiat values for balances and a change password option in settings. The EVM bridge now supports the Rabby wallet.
Research
Research continued on designing new strategies to improve both execution efficiency and decentralization. Specifically, we plan to reduce transaction validation redundancy through novel pre-consensus validation messages. Such messages will also measure transaction cost across several dimensions, such as computation, memory and bandwidth, to enable a more accurate gas charging. Calibration runs on reference hardware produced promising early results.
This quarter the team prepared research on two new protocols. Bluestreak shows how to significantly reduce metadata communication in uncertified DAG consensus protocols such as Starfish, deployed on IOTA Mainnet, by cutting block metadata to a constant size; projected to IOTA Mainnet, this is a roughly 75% reduction in consensus metadata. Vantage is a signature-free BFT protocol with multiple data proposers that matches the latency of signature-based designs without using any signatures.
Ecosystem & Communications
In production, Argentina's national organ-transplant authority, INCUCAI, moved its institutional identities and document signing onto the IOTA Mainnet with Extrimian. INCUCAI and all 24 of its provincial agencies now hold verifiable digital identities, and official documents are notarized on IOTA, while no patient data goes onchain. Read more.
For developers, IOTA L1 is now connected to Pyth Pro, the next generation of Pyth's price feed infrastructure, with lower latency and a broader range of feeds. Pyth Core was retired on IOTA L1 on August 18. Read more. In September, IOTA took part in FUTUREMODE 2026 in Taipei and spoke at ETHTaipei on how institutions choose between private and public chains, and on smart contract security.
This quarter our social media channels centred on trade education and insight, covering access to trade finance, verifying trade documents and the cost of paper-based processes, alongside a community AMA with Dominik Schiener. Our X posts earned 1.05 million impressions, and average reach per post grew 64% on Q2 to around 15,900. On LinkedIn, our posts earned 83,600 impressions.
TWIN & Trade
The document extraction service of the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN) turns trade documents into structured data: it now aligns with UN/CEFACT, the UN’s standards for trade data. Platform releases this quarter also made shared consignment and document data faster to read, cutting latency by about 70% between core releases.
Alongside this, the team continued development work on trade finance and payments capabilities that will leverage IOTA's L1, with more to share soon.
Looking Ahead
Thank you to everyone who builds on, runs and follows IOTA. We look forward to sharing more insights into the behind-the-scenes work of our teams in the next quarterly report.