IOTA Sets May 5, 2025, as Historic Date: What to Expect?

• What happens on 5.5.25?
• Road to IOTA Rebased upgrade IOTA has officially announced that the much-anticipated Rebased network upgrade will go live on May 5, 2025. This marks a historic shift as the network migrates from the current Stardust architecture to the all-new IOTA network.

This upgrade marks the dawn of a new era for IOTA, promising enhanced scalability, security and decentralization.

As stated in a tweet, after May 5, 2025, the IOTA network will have full decentralization (up to 150 validators), increased scalability with over 50,000 TPS and subsecond finality, increased IOTA staking rewards with 10-15% APY and MoveVM for L1 smart contracts.

What happens on 5.5.25?

As stated in an official blog post, nearly all exchanges supporting IOTA trading will be fully compatible with the Rebased mainnet upgrade. While trading on exchanges will continue uninterrupted, IOTA token deposits and withdrawals might be temporarily paused during the upgrade. These services are scheduled to resume shortly as the upgrade is complete.

A 13-Validator Genesis Ceremony would birth the new network. The IOTA Rebased upgrade would involve a carefully orchestrated ceremony conducted by the IOTA Foundation and an initial group of 12 other validators run by trusted entities.

Road to IOTA Rebased upgrade

The IOTA Rebased mainnet upgrade is split into five steps: shutdown and initial preparations, creating the Genesis data, validator verification and signature, finalizing the Genesis and launching the network.

Initially, the Stardust mainnet and IOTA EVM will be shut down simultaneously. Full snapshots of the Stardust ledger state from multiple Hornet nodes will be taken and internally verified by the IOTA Foundation and validators. In the fourth step, validators will execute a finalization command, producing a signed and finalized genesis blob. In the final step, the IOTA Foundation will release a new node software version containing a unique chain ID derived from Genesis data.

Validators will deploy this updated node software, connect and bootstrap the new network. Simultaneously, the IOTA Foundation will activate the necessary infrastructure, including RPC endpoints, node APIs, explorers and wallet applications. The IOTA EVM is expected to resume shortly afterward, within a 4-8 hour window.