Status of the legacy Network
It is right on the day 18 months since the Chrysalis network launched. Those who have been in the community for longer surely remember the old, trinary IOTA. The network update made IOTA faster, easier to use, and more user-friendly. I doubt we would be anywhere near where we are today if it wasn’t for this update!
However, since the new network does not support WOTS (short for Winternitz-One-Time-Signatures — the way of signing your transactions back then), tokens had to be migrated to the new network. Initially, there was a one-week period where users could lock their tokens and receive them on Chrysalis as soon as the network went live. Since this timeframe was too short for everybody migrating (and Ledger users initially couldn’t at all due to a Ledger firmware update breaking the old IOTA app), future migrations had to be allowed. And so, the legacy network was born.
The legacy network is a network that runs a slightly adjusted version of the old IOTA. Spam is disallowed and only transfers to migration addresses will be confirmed by the coordinator. These addresses are generated using your Chrysalis address, so they arrive there, once the legacy coordinator confirms it. Sending to a migration address effectively burns the tokens in the old network, as they are not generated from a legacy private key. Users that run nodes on both networks (like me 😉) validate that the coo is doing as it should. I can happily announce that my node has not caught the Coordinator doing any shady stuff until now.
Migration statistics
All data as of 28.10.2022 8pm GMT
But let’s look into some of the activity on the legacy network! So far, 66.247 addresses worth 2.571 Ti have been migrated. 7952 addresses worth 724Ti made it over in the first week. Note that the treasury is considered migrated here, as the tokens were moved to a migration address. The tokens simply haven’t been added to the Chrysalis network yet, awaiting the launch of Smart Contracts and the election of treasury keepers.
As such, this means there is quite a bit remaining. Currently, 201.964 non-migration addresses are holding 209 Ti on the old network.
We see that there are a lot of addresses with very little balance. This is a prime example of why IOTA needs some sort of dust protection. 16.705 addresses only hold a single IOTA token, and a further 35.441 have more than one but less than 1000. I would assume that most of these addresses were test addresses, with keys long forgotten. Even if they make up a quarter of the unmigrated addresses, the total balance of these addresses is just below 7,3Mi.
Since the current network has a minimum of 1Mi, these addresses are unrecoverable right now (you would have to spend them with others to reach 1Mi). As a result, over a hundred thousand addresses holding a total of 5,6Gi are affected! If the Shimmer dust protection with the same parameters was used (100i/v_byte) this would lower the minimum to 42.600i and only make 306Mi non-migratable.
Ongoing migration
Despite popular belief, migration is far from over. Almost every day, a bunch of tokens makes their way to Chrysalis. Right now, most of them are small balances, but occasionally, you can spot some of the bigger fish in there. In May, 8,8Ti were migrated to a single address. Also, a few days ago we had one with 41Gi. People that act now have likely been absent from the IOTA community for a while (given they didn’t return for staking), so let’s welcome them back!
Counting the treasury in, we find that 92.5% of tokens are migrated. A value beyond every expectation. Just another data point that shows how awesome this community is. So few tokens have gone lost in all these rough years, and most of the bigger IOTA hodlers are still active. Big wow.
The future of migration
I think the option to migrate needs to remain active for several years. I like to think of these wallets as lost bank accounts, where the owner cannot be reached by any means. Outside the crypto space, these accounts are maintained for centuries as the bank attempts to regain contact.
Now, crypto is different than traditional banking, that’s for sure. But also here there are people that “lost contact” with IOTA for various reasons. Maybe they left due to the bear market or got interested in another project, forgetting that they still have some IOTA tokens in their wallet. These people likely remember when they hear about IOTA again, for example, due to increasing adoption. However, likely most of the still unmigrated tokens are irrecoverable due to lost keys.
In any case, migration has to switch to a smart contract soon, as the current solution does not work without the coordinator. This would mark the end of the legacy network and allow the new coo-less network to govern the unclaimed tokens.