Community Member Spotlight: ID.iota (@id_iota)
[Interview by IotaPoet]
IotaPoet: Which coin do you think will be worth more on 21 August 2024- IOTA or Shimmer?
ID.iota: Great Question! I really love how those discussions come up and how everyone got surprised with the Shimmer Marketcap suddenly being at above 200 Million USD. We are still above 100 Million USD at the time of writing (2nd February), which puts us at 15% of IOTAs Marketcap. To compare the numbers, Kusama, the staging network of Polkadot, is at 5% of Polkadots Marketcap.
So basically, the market saw more in Shimmer than just a staging network and as we can see even the IOTA Foundation is pivoting. Shimmer isn’t any longer just the “little crazy Cousin” from Iota. Shimmer is advertised as “feeless, parallelized DAG ledger to secure and create fully customizable smart contract chains”. And if you listen to what the IF is communicating in Discord lately you see that they are eager to bring things to success with Shimmer.
So that’s how the IF and the market understands Shimmer, but we also see quite different tokenomics for Shimmer and IOTA till today. We have token locks through the storage deposit, and we will see $SMR as the token necessary to pay fees whenever using ShimmerEVM.
I think at the end it depends, if the market thinks that strong Shimmer leads to strong IOTA, or if the market doesn’t see any price adaption from Shimmer to IOTA. My guess is 21st of August 2024 is too early in either case. If Shimmer becomes the go-to place for Web3 and IOTA becomes the go-to place in real world adoption, then we will see a Shimmer close to IOTA in 2025 and IOTA above Shimmer in 2029.
IP: So tell us- how did your IOTA journey start?
II: It all started sometime in 2017. I earned my first money and was smart enough to invest in ETFs and laughed about Bitcoin pumping. The time people at my workplace started talking about the Bitcoin I knew this bubble is going to burst. Then, a little later my brother called me, and we talked about IOTA. I researched, got hooked and invested my first money into it. I think we paid 2 US-Dollar per MIOTA at that time.
It took till the next bull market until I really became part of the ecosystem and inhaled everything about IOTA. So, if you are annoyed about my threads, blame it on my brother!
IP: What’s an aspect of IOTA/ Shimmer technology you are most interested in?
II: I think people underestimate the brilliance of the Iota Smart Contracts design. It really is an evolution to what we got in crypto up to now, and might be the foundation on which IOTA can build for years from now. It is super flexible and will support Solidity and WASM for DApps. Developers will be able to build whatever they want wherever they want on IOTA. With the integration of Move in the L1, we will even see L1 smart contracts. I think people haven’t really grasped, that with this ISC framework ShimmerEVM is just the beginning.
The IOTA 2.0 technology might be a game changer, but we don’t know the details yet. ISC is here and it's great!
IP: What’s a point you think a lot of people are overlooking in relation to IOTA/Shimmer?
II: During the last bull run we got the impression that several protocols solved the trilemma. Avalanche, Solana and BNB all claim, that they are decentralized, secure and scalable. However, they really just increased the necessary efforts to run a chain validator, to a level that no one was able to participate in the validation anymore. Thus, no decentralization.
Even Protocols like Aleph_Zero are currently running on 14 validators, 10 of those 14 validators are currently run by the Aleph_Zero foundation themselves. All those protocols are great. None of them has solved real decentralization.
But hasn’t the space agreed that decentralization isn’t that important anymore? Well, we develop in another direction now. Scalability is achievable through rollups. This is however only useful if the Layer 1 you anchor in is super secure and really decentralized.
The whole development of IOTA 2.0 has decentralization at its core. If the IF is able to deliver on its vision and we are able to reach 3, 4 or even 5 figure throughput and the L1 DAG, with medium and low requirements on the nodes, this protocol is able to change everything we have ever seen in this space before.
IP: What motivates you to post such detailed threads about IOTA/Shimmer even during the bear market?
II: To be honest, I don’t care too much about the market. I am happy if we are pumping. I am sad if we are down. I lost significant amounts of money in IOTA but I believe in my investment. I think IOTA could really change things in the crypto space.
I wrote my first thread after the Twitter Space from @CryptoMiners_Co with Jonas Theis (one of the research developers of IOTA 2.0). The interview was pretty bad. Jonas was there to talk about IOTA 2.0 but was only asked about JLR, Project Alvarium, Trademark Africa and some other things he basically knew nothing about, because they just aren’t part of his work.
So afterwards I thought, we really need to put everything Jonas said into easy words, so everyone can understand the depth of the whole IOTA 2.0 design. Therefore, I wrote first my thread. It got incredible attention and here I am.
I keep going, because I really think IOTA is a gem, but no one wants to explain its tech in simple words. We need easy to understand explanations that aren’t expecting a lot of background knowledge. I feel like, that might become my part in the ecosystem.
IP: Which Shimmer project are you looking forward to the most once the ShimmerEVM drops?
II: Oh, they are all great! I am super happy about our DEX-Landscape, with TangleSwap having more of an Asian Community, TangleSea with more of a European community and Iotabee with their Soonaverse partnership.
I can’t wait for what Nakama is building with Deepr and Accumulator and obviously the whole Soonaverse Ecosystem…
But most excited I am about TangleHub and IotaOrigin. I don’t fully grasp yet what they are doing and can’t wait to see how they will build their vision on ShimmerEVM.
IP: Which guest would you love to hear on the Moonaco Podcast?
II: Wen ID_IOTA on Moonaco Podcast?
The EnergieKnip episode was so great! Adri is such a rolemodel for a real builder. I also really liked the episode with Kutkraft. It was so nice to hear those fine man have a talk about their life and IOTA.
I think Thomas should have a talk with the people behind iotaheroes. They are really building stuff and do use the capabilities the IOTA technology provides them. I am really interested in their ShimmerEVM release.
Furthermore, trading card games like SpeakNFT or Dark Mythos are looking really promising and haven’t been part of the podcast as well. Would really love to hear from them!
IP: Are you following any other projects/protocols?
II: I do follow a little bit of the tech development of DAGs in our space. Especially Aleph ZERO and Constellation. Furthermore I am trying to read a lot about zero knowledge proofs and how this tech can change the crypto space. I will try to invest more time in the future though.
IP: Do you think IOTA can compete with more established DeFi protocols such as Ethereum?
II: This is dependent on IOTA 2.0 and if the Iota Foundation will deliver. If we see the minimum viable product (MVP) of IOTA 2.0 until June this year, I think we absolutely could become a top 20 coin again (next to Cosmos, Avalanche, Fantom and Aptos).
Up until that time I think there is a reasonable argument that IOTA is still centralized and shouldn’t be valued as more decentralized protocols like Cosmos or Ethereum.
However, everyone in the IOTA community should know that DeFi Protocols are often valued by their TVL (Total Value Locked). So, it's everyone’s duty to bring Shimmer to success by using the DAPPs that come with it. It is a joint effort from community and builders.
IP: What do you have planned for your Twitter account going forward?
II: I would really love to get consistent with my output. A weekly thread, that explains one part of the tech. One weekly look into the ecosystem and maybe a weekly update on what’s happening on GitHub. That would be where I imagine my content in the future.
Now I really need to finish things in my private life. My master thesis needs to be written until March and afterwards I must move for a new job… So let’s hope for bigger things in the second half 2023, hopefully just in time with a working IOTA 2.0 MVP and ShimmerEVM Release.