IOTA announces decentralized smart contract network for Web 3 and Metaverse
One of the largest crypto platforms, IOTA, recently launched a new decentralized Layer 1 smart contract network, Assembly. According to the official announcement, the assembly will launch Mainnet in 2022 as a permission-free network managed by the IOTA community. The Assembly smart contract network will also have its own cryptocurrency, the ASMB token.
The open distribution of the ASMB tokens is slated to begin very soon, with the first airdrop going to the IOTA token holders. In an unprecedented decision, developers, early adopters, and DAOs of the Assembly ecosystem are set to receive the lion’s share of 70% of the total ASMB token offering.
Assembly aims to become one of the largest crypto ecosystems by providing unique technical capabilities for dApp developers that expand their capabilities. Assembly also aims to bring Web 3.0 and the Metaverse into the mainstream by building an open, community-managed network. Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chairman of the IOTA Foundation, commented on this development :
“Assembly is a key component of our mission to build the decentralized economy. It is a perfect example of a democratic, integrative, interoperable technology that harnesses the power of the decentralized, license-free and fee-free Tangle to achieve unmatched performance and advance an entire ecosystem. In the spirit of inclusion, cooperation and empowerment, we are changing another facet of digital life and inviting as many people as possible to join us. “
Architecture and how assembly works
The new decentralized smart contracts platform Assembly has a novel architecture based on the framework of IOTA’s smart contracts. It also uses the IOTA network as an unchangeable anchor of trust and as a bridge to interoperability between smart contracts.
Assembly also offers developers the flexibility to start their own smart contract chains or to adapt existing ones. In this way, the developers can benefit from the common security of the entire network. In addition, the directed acyclic structure of IOTA will facilitate the parallel execution of smart contracts. This ensures that the assembly platform can scale out while maintaining interoperability, compatibility, and security of the network.
Assembly will also introduce a decentralized validator marketplace. Here, the smart contract chains will compete economically with one another based on their properties and fee schedules. Assembly will also have a unique reward structure as incentives for validators. This includes fixed fee payments in stablecoins along with a creative token distribution of the ASMB tokens.
With these innovative features, Assembly offers powerful tool sets to all involved, removing the existing barriers to crypto adoption. It also says:
“The combined properties of Assembly will fuel the development of smart contracts in their various forms, including DeFi and NFTs, and create an open and interoperable decentralized economy.”
However, Assembly should not be viewed as an “Ethereum killer”. Rather, it is a platform that can coexist with Ethereum. Developers who prefer the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for smart contracts will find full compatibility with the assembly infrastructure.
