The IOTA network’s MIOTA token was a strong performer in the crypto market today as the team announced a new smart contract network. The smart contract will be known as Assembly and will be based on IOTA’s current smart contracts framework.
According to the announcement from IOTA, Assembly will “leverage on the IOTA network as an immutable trust anchor and as a trustless bridge for feeless interoperability between smart contracts.” The firm then added that it expects this to “supercharge smart contract development in its various forms, including decentralized finance and NFTs.”
Assembly will be launched in 2022, and will come with its own native token ASMB. The token will initially be distributed to existing MIOTA holders via an airdrop that will begin “shortly,”suggesting that holders could receive the new token within the next few weeks.
Future token distributions will be voted for by the IOTA community however tokens will be mainly reserved for developers, early adopters and decentralized autonomous organizations of the network.
The new smart contract network will offer a range of capabilities. The announcement said that it will come with “fixed fees as low as $0 thanks to the flexibility to individually define execution fees for smart contracts.”
“With these innovations, Assembly offers builders a powerful toolset to eliminate existing barriers to entry and bring the next billion users to crypto,” the team explained.
Per the Assembly website, users can stake MIOTA to earn ASMB tokens. A wallet known as Firefly will be needed for users to claim their rewards. The firm has not yet released a date for when the new tokens will become or valuable or when staking will begin.
The news of the new smart contract network from IOTA came on the same day as a rally in the price of MIOTA , with the token surging almost 7% over the past 24 hours to $1.5159. The price is up almost 9% in a month and 366% in a year.
The gains for the MIOTA token were significant way before the new smart contract announcement. The MIOTA token first started trading higher at around 04:00 UTC, and has risen by more than 13% since then.
MIOTA was today’s best performing token among the top 100 crypto assets by market cap, ahead of Uniswap’s UNI token and Cardano’s ADA, which rose by almost 5% over the same time period.