How IOTA’s Starfish Upgrade is Targeting a $35 Trillion Opportunity

• IOTA welcomed its new consensus protocol, Starfish, this week to make the network resilient for real-world conditions.
• Starfish is ideal for the $35 trillion global trade industry, where technical breakdowns and outages can wreak havoc on node synchronization.

This week, IOTA announced that Starfish was finally live on the mainnet, replacing the existing Mysticeti as the consensus algorithm for the network. IOTA described it as a landmark upgrade in its quest to build infrastructure that works in real-world conditions.

As ETHNews reported, Starfish was activated through the release of protocol version 24 via IOTA v1.12.1. The upgrade first landed on the testnet in Q1 through version 1.16.0, but is now ready for public deployment.

Starfish replaces Mysticeti, a consensus protocol that has made IOTA an industry leader in uptime and low latency. However, the network designed Mysticeti for optimal conditions and blockchain-specific use cases like DeFi and trading. With IOTA now shifting to real-world use cases, Mysticeti has struggled to coordinate nodes that experienced outages or lagged behind their peers.

IOTA Targets a $35 Trillion Opportunity

IOTA started as a network for the Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communication. As ETHNews has covered over the years, it has since evolved to target real-world use cases, key among them tokenization and global trade.

Trade, in particular, presents a massive opportunity for blockchain disruption. Today, global trade is a $35 trillion industry that spans every country globally. However, despite its size, it has failed to evolve, and in an age where everything is digitalized, the sector still relies on outdated, costly and unreliable paper documents. Data shows that over 4 billion paper documents are still in circulation today.

The result is slow transactions that are rife with fraud. According to some estimates, the sector records up to $5 billion in losses annually from document fraud and has a $2.5 trillion trade financing gap.

IOTA has been working to fill this void over the past five years. Its main solution is the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN), a flagship open-source digital trade infrastructure digitizing trade and supply chains. TWIN is a collaboration between the IOTA Foundation and the World Economic Forum, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, TradeMark Africa and others.

While TWIN was designed to absorb disruptions along the global supply chains, it was underpinned by IOTA’s Mysticeti, which could not keep up. These disruptions slowed the network down as Mysticeti struggled to coordinate nodes that had varying uptime and speed.

Starfish solves this by allowing the network to keep working even when some nodes disconnect or lag behind. These nodes can then recover independently without any effect on the overall network.

This is a critical feature. IOTA now powers applications that large enterprises and even governments rely on. For such entities, downtime is not an option.

TWIN is already powering trade in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. As the IOTA Foundation revealed in the Q1 Progress Report, the network expanded its coverage in Kenya, where nodes can share visibility into their data with revenue authorities, trading counterparties and other community nodes while retaining the source data.

In Rwanda, the network completed a pilot with the government and other stakeholders on on-chain coffee exports. TWIN also expanded into Europe, partnering with the UK government and Teeside University to establish an information-sharing network at the Teeside Port facility.

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