The debut of Shimmer will take place at the same time as the introduction of staking incentives. Staking IOTA tokens will be available for the very first time, straight inside the Firefly wallet, as part of a new feature introduced recently. In addition, they will be able to earn staking incentives in the form of Shimmer tokens by participating in the game.
In order to achieve IOTA’s vision of becoming a completely decentralized, programmable multi-asset ledger, Shimmer will include a variety of enhancements, including the following:
- Programmable multi-asset ledger
- Smart Contracts
- Full decentralization
- Sharding and further optimizations
“Launching Shimmer was a simple choice for our group since it allowed us to speed and safeguard our route towards complete decentralization with IOTA,” said Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation.
“As witnessed by the achievement of Kusama and Polkadot, the Shimmer network will evolve into an incentivized staging network that will provide critical testing and public approval for our grandiose development roadmap.”
Shimmer will offer an innovation test bed with the appropriate incentives for the tech community in order to begin designing use cases and apps that adhere to the official IOTA development plan. These include DeFi with lightning-fast transactions, an infinite number of tokenization options, bespoke zero-fee smart contracts, and NFTs that may be issued and sold with no minting or trading fees.
Shimmer eliminates the requisite for the community to stand in line for audited and finalized product releases. It has access to a full ecosystem of apps. DeFi on the application layer will drive innovation, and so will additional features on the basic protocol layer, including multi-chain smart contracts, advanced output formats, sharding, and cost free tokenization.
The Shimmer network, which will be fueled by the Shimmer token, will be completely in the hands of the community. Shimmer token holders may earn up to 8% APY by staking their tokens. The network will be live when the public token distribution is completed at the start of 2022.