Introducing Shimmer Network and Token

Published on: 16.11.2021

The Shimmer network will be the official, incentivized staging network of IOTA.

It will be an essential part of IOTA’s path to increased utility, ecosystem growth and full decentralization. Shimmer will help to publicly validate every major upcoming upgrade before they reach the IOTA network.

Shimmer will also play an essential role in ensuring that every upgrade of the network will be followed by a smooth and secure transition for all token holders and applications. Especially for the upgrade to IOTA 2.0 (full decentralization and the Coordicide), we need to make sure that the transition is carefully planned and executed. Shimmer will be a guide for IOTA and all of its network participants, helping to minimize risk and maximize the safety of all future network upgrades.

All development goes through four phases: new features are being developed, tested in a limited test environment, released on Shimmer to be validated in a public environment, to be released on IOTA

Launched as an open and permissionless network, anyone is able to join the Shimmer network, build on it, and even attack it. In this way, Shimmer will become a long-term staging network that enables the IOTA ecosystem to test new solutions faster with higher stability than typical testnets. With Shimmer, the IOTA universe will benefit from a rapid development environment for faster innovation cycles. Ultimately, it is up to the community to realize the potential of Shimmer.

The landscape of Shimmer applications may begin small, but – depending on the community’s involvement – it is expected to grow as more discover its full potential and want to participate. There is an entire ecosystem of new tokenization, digital assets, NFT and DeFi use cases to build.

Partners and service providers already integrated with IOTA will easily be able to integrate Shimmer and the Shimmer token with no significant development overhead. For the launch, the following IOTA applications and tooling will offer full support for Shimmer: