IOTA Foundation has launched, in beta testing, new feeless, easy to program, and scalable smart contracts for the IOTA blockchain. It is a breathtaking moment for the IOTA community because the blockchain had no support for smart contracts before, but also a potentially great alternative to Ethereum and Cardano smart contracts.
The smart contracts can be tried on the IOTA 2.0 DevNet.
With the new feature, IOTA developers will be able to develop smart contracts on the IOTA blockchain, and at the same time deploy the same on the Ethereum blockchain as the code will be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and ERC-20 tokens.
IOTA Foundation CEO Dominic Schiener said the new feeless smart contracts will not make the blockchain an Ethereum killer or competitor, but they would help facilitate mainstream usage of blockchains and smart contracts.
“Our objective is to become a leader alongside Ethereum and make sure that our future will be decentralized. We want to help advance our young industry towards mainstream adoption and establish trust as a free public good for all societies to benefit from.”
“Together with our community, we will be one of the main contributors of new decentralized innovations on #protocol and #application layer. We will dare to push forward with new concepts to overcome the barriers which are holding us back.”
He previously said fees add an unnecessary burden on the economic models and are not an economic driver when it comes to the utilization of smart contracts. The smart contracts will also be a turning point for the blockchain to welcome DeFi, Web3, and NFT applications in addition to focusing on the Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communications. This, said the CEO, will expand the blockchain’s use case in the world of finance, digital identity, and data management.
Smart contract chain developers and owners can set fees for smart contract execution and this, according to an explainer from the company, will lead to lowering of the fees as different chain owners will work to compete against each other to execute the smart contracts.
“In fact, smart contract chain developers have full flexibility to define their chain and tokenomics. In the future they could even set transaction fees to zero and instead reward validators with their native tokens, thus creating their own economies and massively reducing the entry barriers for their dApp.”
Although the smart contracts are on beta testing currently, they will pave way for the launch of the upcoming feeless NFT marketplace that will allow users to mint NFTs without transaction fees. The NFTs will be based on the blockchain natively but can be used on Ethereum or Polkadot networks through the smart contracts.
