First published 1 April 2020. Expanded in October 2026 so the displayed coin is not confused with the base unit, and so a missing fee is not described as nobody in charge. IOTA is its own ledger. David Sønstebø and Dominik Schiener are the people most associated with the early project. Mainnet opened on 11 July 2016. There is no mining in the Bitcoin sense, and a transfer was designed without a protocol fee. To add a transaction, the design has the sender approve two earlier ones. That is the mechanism. This page will not walk through it.
The chain created 2,779,530,283,277,761 base units, called iotas, and no more. Markets quote one IOTA as a million of those, which is why the figure on a price page is about 2.78 billion. The price row for this page uses that market unit. A balance that still counts raw iotas is a million times larger than the same holding quoted as IOTA. All of it existed at the start. There is no inflation schedule.
For years a node run by the IOTA Foundation, called the coordinator, issued milestones that the network treated as confirmation. A foundation node is a person in charge, even when the brochure says there are no miners. Later software was meant to retire that node. This page will not tell you which release is current. In 2020 the foundation said its Trinity desktop wallet had been compromised. The ledger did not mint replacement coins. A wallet program is not the chain. An IOTA address is not an Ethereum address. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Nothing here is an instruction to set up a node, to recover a wallet, or to buy IOTA.
