- IOTA launched Shimmer Network which serves as a testbed before introducing main features to the IOTA mainnet.
- IOTA is completely risk-averse and well-suited to serve government and industry needs. On the other hand, Shimmer will serve crypto applications that require a much faster pace of innovation.
With a vision for the future, the IOTA ecosystem has been expanding very fast recently. The two main pillars of the IOTA ecosystem are currently the Tangle and the Shimmer Networks. The Tangle technology is relatively older and designed specifically to cater to the IoT environment.
The major purpose behind unveiling the IOTA tangle was to drive zero-fee micro-transactions with near-instant transfers. Recently in September 2022, the IOTA also unveiled a new staging network dubbed Shimmer which caters to the Web3 and NFT requirements of IOTA.
There still seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the relation between #IOTA and #Shimmer. Does it even make sense to have two networks long term?
Let me give you my take on this in a🧵(1/11) pic.twitter.com/xUWsOXGgQD— psow (@psow86) December 28, 2022
Shimmer is basically a test network that will serve as the testbed for testing new features before getting them on the IOTA mainnet. However, there’s been a lot of confusion between IOTA and Shimmer recently. Some people are also asking whether it is right to have two networks for the long term. Let’s answer a few misconceptions.
What’s the difference between IOTA and Shimmer?
As said the initial purpose of the Shimmer Network is to test smart contracts before they make their way to the IOTA mainnet. Furthermore, with the Coordice upgrade, the IOTA blockchain will be moving towards complete decentralization. Shimmer will provide an environment with a real stake so that hackers are really tempted to break it.
Once everything is proven to work on Shimmer, IOTA will likely get these two upgrades with a few months of delay. However, the role of Shimmer Network doesn’t end here. It will continue to cater to future upgrades within the IOTA ecosystem.
Also read: IOTA starts beta live testing for login solution for billion-$-market – Report
Why Both IOTA and Shimmer Are Important?
On Twitter, psow, one of the contributors to IOTA and Shimmer explained through an interesting analogy why both networks are important and how they can cater to different requirements. Platforms like Linux have both – Fedora and RHEL. Fedora gets quick updates but sometimes causes major issues. On the other hand, RHEL is a bit older and well-tested software that causes rarely any issues.
As a result, Fedora basically serves as a desktop OS for use by regular people. Similarly, Red Hat will majorly serve as a Server OS for use in industries/businesses. A similar could be the case for IOTA and Shimmer.
IOTA is completely risk-averse and well-suited to serve government and industry needs. On the other hand, Shimmer will serve crypto applications that require a much faster pace of innovation. Psow further explains:
We should also consider that all projects optimize some of their aspects, while sacrificing some others deemed less important. AFAIK, due to its architecture IOTA is less affected by this than other projects, but it is still affected.
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There may come a time when it will become useful to diverge the two networks in terms of their parameters or even modules, so they can better serve their respective target groups (by optimizing & sacrificing different things).
