IOTA Introduces Starfish Consensus to Strengthen Real-World Blockchain Infrastructure

• Starfish, a major consensus upgrade, is live on the IOTA testnet.
• Starfish introduces erasure-coded data distribution and Data Availability Certificates, allowing nodes to rebuild transaction data.

IOTA has rolled out Starfish on its testnet as a new consensus protocol intended to keep the ledger advancing even when network conditions leave some validators behind. The IOTA Foundation announced the rollout on February 11, 2026. Starfish is a consensus upgrade built for environments where distributed systems must continue operating even when some validators lag or temporarily lose sync.

The main operational change at the consensus layer is how the network handles validators that fall behind. Previously, network progress depended on tight coordination, so individual delays could slow overall progress. IOTA said Starfish is built so the network continues advancing while lagging validators recover in parallel, rather than forcing the full set of validators to wait for perfect alignment.

The deployment places Starfish as the testnet consensus track in IOTA’s current setup, while Mysticeti continues to secure the mainnet. IOTA testnet rollout is focused on robustness for real-world connectivity and operating constraints.

Earlier this month, we covered that IOTA-powered TWIN moved into live use across UK border pilots through a partnership between the IOTA Foundation and Teesside University. The pilot targets paper-heavy trade processes by shifting documentation into digital records.

IOTA’s Protocol Level Changes With Starfish

The Starfish whitepaper presents a partially synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol built on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Tests against other leading DAG-based BFT designs maintained stable throughput and low overhead in steady network conditions and during Byzantine behavior. Starfish allows the network to tolerate faults while reducing communication costs, which supports use in large-scale distributed ledger deployments.

Therefore, the goal is to avoid the extra progress rounds associated with certified DAG construction while also reducing the security and efficiency trade-offs that uncertified DAG designs can face.

The whitepaper presents “Encoded Cordial Dissemination” as the central mechanism for reducing communication overhead while maintaining data availability checks. The method combines Reed–Solomon erasure coding with Data Availability Certificates (DACs). In the design, each validator disseminates complete transaction data for its own blocks and distributes encoded shards for other validators’ blocks, enabling reconstruction once enough shards are received.

For availability verification, DACs are tied to committed leader blocks, which are used to confirm that referenced transaction data can be recovered. Starfish extends an uncertified DAG BFT commit rule to efficiently verify data availability through committed leader blocks serving as DACs.

In recent news, CNF revealed why the IOTA Foundation is prioritizing USDT integration as a route to stable liquidity for DeFi, trade finance, and tokenized settlement on the network. 

At press time, IOTA was up 3.25% over the past 24 hours, trading at $0.06780, while volume jumped 48% in the same period.