IOTA & TWIN Progress Update: Q2 2026

Welcome to our Progress Update for the second quarter of 2026. This report summarizes the key milestones, protocol enhancements, real-world trade deployments, and ecosystem growth achieved over the past three months.

Following the strategic direction outlined in the $IOTA Manifesto, the Foundation is fully focused on supporting and scaling TWIN, the open digital trade infrastructure. To reflect this commitment, our organizational structure has evolved since last quarter: engineering, research, design, and product teams are now vertically integrated into a singular pipeline dedicated to driving global trade adoption. By moving past isolated, general-purpose blockchain lines, we’re concentrating our talent on building a resilient, compliant, and production-grade network for the global economy.

Core Protocol & Data Infrastructure

This quarter marked a historic milestone for our core network infrastructure. The team successfully delivered a highly resilient consensus model while significantly streamlining the node codebase to meet institutional requirements.

Starfish Consensus & Network Hardening

• Mainnet Activation: On April 23, 2026, the next-generation Starfish consensus protocol officially went live on the $IOTA Mainnet. This major upgrade enhances network stability and guarantees continuous operation under real-world conditions. For a detailed breakdown, read our official Starfish Mainnet Release Announcement and the technical deep-dive on Why Starfish Matters.

• Proactive Architecture Hardening: As part of our commitment to institutional-grade security, the consensus and virtual machine teams completed comprehensive audits and introduced rigorous reference safety checks. These proactive updates strengthen the protocol against potential adversarial edge-cases and validate the network’s production readiness. This framework was further solidified with the completion of Protocol Version 29, which incorporates smart contract safety enhancements and protects the network against complex operational edge-cases.
• Completion of Starfish-Speed: The core development of our optimistic commit rule was completed and verified locally, reducing the latency under good network conditions while maintaining the stable performance of Starfish when network conditions degrade.
• Optimized Transaction Execution: Concurrently, the implementation of our certificate-less transaction flow (P-COOL) achieved significant milestones, proving that the network can deliver higher performance with half the traditional resource footprint. The last remaining tasks are being finalized before testing and bringing P-COOL to the public networks.

Data Layer & Operational Efficiency

Q2 was a success in making $IOTA more capable for the people building on it and cheaper for the people running it.

• Account Abstraction & Programmable Identity: Account Abstraction is live on Mainnet, removing the reliance on a single, fixed verification scheme for $IOTA accounts. Developers can now write custom sign-in logic to control how users access and protect assets. This built-in flexibility inherently prepares accounts for the quantum era by enabling seamless transitions to quantum-resistant signature schemes, several of which are undergoing rigorous benchmarking and stress testing to ensure absolute stability under real network load.
• Next-Generation SDK Rebuild: The core SDK has been entirely rebuilt from the ground up to achieve faster compilation speeds and a significantly smaller application footprint. It integrates natively with languages enterprise teams are already utilizing, including Python, Kotlin, C#, Go, Swift, and WebAssembly (WASM). Distributed via npm, the WASM packages allow developers to build on $IOTA directly within the browser across JavaScript and TypeScript. The framework is supported by typed tooling that translates raw ledger objects into predictable data structures, streamlined gRPC connectivity, and enhanced command-line utilities.
• Live Data Streaming & Consistency: Applications can now subscribe directly to live data streams across every network, allowing them to react to on-chain events in real time rather than relying on legacy polling models. A rebuilt consistency engine returns precise, point-in-time ledger views for every query, while robust fallback systems ensure historical data remains completely accessible—including comprehensive, address-level audit trails.
• Node Operational Cost Reduction: Core storage optimizations have successfully reduced the active node data footprint by approximately one-third in testing environments, significantly lowering long-term infrastructure and maintenance costs for operators. To support infrastructure teams in running lean node deployments, a formalized data retention policy and a comprehensive operator handbook have been officially released.

TWIN Ecosystem & Global Deployments

TWIN is actively building and expanding its commercial relationships, ecosystem footprint, and pipeline prospects across core trade corridors.

Strategic Collaborations

• TMA Kenya Commercial Framework: The team held productive working sessions with Trademark Africa (TMA) to design a viable, self-sustaining commercial model for the deployment of our trade infrastructure in Kenya, successfully aligning on operational structures and future fee frameworks.

Global Corridors

• ADAPT Initiative Rollout: Implementation is officially underway for the Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade (ADAPT) initiative. Developed alongside the AfCFTA Secretariat, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the World Economic Forum, the pilot connects digital identity, data exchange, and payment interoperability across its first three core nations. Explore the full strategy in our post on the first ADAPT Implementations. Expanding on this momentum, the program was officially presented to Nigeria’s Central Coordination Committee to map out institutional milestones, while sandbox design talks advanced with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). Concurrently, funding and scaling discussions were opened with prominent global banking institutions

• TLIP Progress: The platform hit a major validation milestone with the launch of TLIP v1.3.9, successfully achieving a 95% pass rate across all active test profiles and confirming seamless node-to-node document subscription channels between authorities in Kenya. Further developments are underway.
• United Kingdom Maritime Trade: The UK deployment arm achieved significant high-level milestones, securing five core signatories for the International Supply Network (ISN) Memorandum of Understanding. Infrastructure deployment and scoping integrations are actively moving forward alongside regional port authorities, major freight forwarders, and trade bodies to track and optimize critical import routes.

Legal & Governance

This quarter saw significant progress across three core legal and governance workstreams: governance and data protection work continued on ensuring TLIP is positioned for its public release in full compliance with applicable data protection obligations in Kenya; legal preparations for the TWIN pilots in the United Kingdom to support pilot integrations across the logistics and transportation industry; and collaboration with the TWIN’s strategic partners on the governance strategy and operating model to drive adoption, including work on the frameworks for IP ownership and licensing, as well as sustainable funding models.

Ecosystem Communications & Brand Strategy

Communications efforts this quarter successfully transitioned from protocol-centric awareness toward institutional trust-building, emphasizing compliance, interoperability, and real-world outcomes.

Marketing Campaigns & Web Optimizations

Trusted Trade Campaign: We officially launched the Trusted Trade brand awareness campaign, illustrating how digital trust is embedded directly into global logistics. The campaign’s performance impact has been:

• 333 000 impressions
• 12 500 engagements, for an engagement rate of 3.7%

The campaign successfully boosted TWIN’s visibility threefold, and the engagement on TWIN has increased fourfold,with a healthy follower growth of 9%. We will continue to leverage TWIN’s corporate channels to scale this momentum.

Web Surface Optimization: To support our growing ecosystem, key functional $IOTA interfaces (including the $IOTA Foundation portal and specialized digital notarization features, a new digital notarization center on the Explorer, and Rabby wallet integration on the EVM Bridge) have been comprehensively redesigned and optimized for global stakeholders.

Major Q2 Content Releases

The team published several high-signal pieces documenting our technological shifts and ecosystem success stories:

• Protocol Milestones: Starfish Mainnet Consensus Upgrade and the companion Technical Deep-Dive.
• Trade Infrastructure: Pan-African ADAPT Implementation Launch.
• Ecosystem Achievements: The MasterZ Hackathon Finale

We’re continuously improving our visual identity, utilizing clean, abstract animations and technical illustrations to represent how our invisible digital infrastructure is becoming the new fabric of global commerce.

Academic Publications & Research

The Research team continued to validate our underlying architecture through peer-reviewed academic channels, submitting three major papers during the quarter:

1. Consensus Optimization: Bluestreak: Block Reference Compression in DAG-based Consensus (Submitted to the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles – SOSP).
2. Congestion Control: Optimal Transaction Sequencing and Congestion Control in Certificate-less Flow (Submitted to the ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies Journal).
3. Network Topology: Evaluating Centralization Metrics in Decentralized Consensus Architectures (Submitted to the Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies – AFT).

With major announcements planned for the next quarter, we’re looking forward to sharing more insights into the behind-the-scenes work of our teams in the next quarterly report.

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