IOTA Marks 10 Years: Binance Joins as Validator, $2M in Staking Rewards Unlocked

• IOTA has had milestones over the past 10 years; some are technical upgrades, others are ecosystem or governance achievements.
• The most recent one is that Binance has officially joined the IOTA network, serving as a sign of its confidence in the project’s trajectory.

The year 2025 marks a major milestone for IOTA, as the project celebrates a full decade since its launch. Born in 2015, IOTA set out with a vision to move beyond the limitations of traditional blockchains by introducing its unique Tangle technology, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) designed to enable feeless transactions, scalability, and efficiency for the growing Internet of Things (IoT) economy.

Over the past 10 years, IOTA has grown from an experimental concept into a recognized player in the distributed ledger space. Commenting on this milestone, Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA, has posted on X that,

I’m really proud to be part of IOTA, and I’m here to make us the leading L1 network. Data, identity, assets, supply chains, industries, countries – we will bring the real world on-chain. We are just getting started.

From the early days of focusing purely on IoT transactions to its more recent emphasis on tokenomics, decentralization, and ecosystem adoption, IOTA has consistently adapted to stay relevant.

To crown its 10-year milestone, IOTA has brought in a partner: Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, is officially stepping in as a validator on the IOTA network. To mark the occasion, Binance Simple Earn rolled out a special launch for IOTA on October 1, unlocking 2 million IOTA tokens in staking rewards.

Users can now stake IOTA with returns of up to 29.9% APR, with rewards scaling based on lock-up periods of 30, 60, or 120 days, making the celebration both rewarding and accessible to the community.

The festivities didn’t stop online: Today, IOTA threw a 10th Anniversary Party in Singapore, raffling off 250,000 IOTA tokens to 10 lucky winners alongside exclusive prizes like branded Keystone wallets and goodie bags. With these incentives, IOTA is leaning further into community and DeFi engagement.

Rising Institutional Interest

Recently, CNF highlighted remarks from Dominik Schiener, who confirmed that institutional investors are showing growing interest in IOTA, while governments and corporations are actively exploring how to integrate its technology into national infrastructure projects.

This rising attention stems from years of audits, testnets, and tooling improvements, which have steadily matured the network.

One of the highlights of the IOTA journey came this year on May 5. IOTA unveiled IOTA Rebased, an upgrade that introduces an object-based ledger architecture, enhanced account and token models, developer tools such as wallets, dashboards, and SDKs, after being under development for over a year.

Just days later, on May 8, the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN) Foundation was launched during the AfCFTA Digital Trade Forum in Lusaka, Zambia. TWIN is a nonprofit initiative designed to modernize cross-border trade by enabling countries and businesses to exchange data across supply chains in real time with greater speed, security, and transparency.

Backed by six global organizations, including the IOTA Foundation, World Economic Forum, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, TradeMark Africa, Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, and the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade, TWIN has already begun testing its TIP platform in Kenya in partnership with agencies like the Kenya Revenue Authority.

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