What is Shimmer Network?

Shimmer Network is a network High-speed blockchain with advanced capability for smart contracts, native tokens, and NFTs. The technological base of the network is the same that has made the project a reality IOTA and that uses its technology to make all the specifications come true.

In this way, Shimmer Network becomes a canary network or rapid development for IOTA, and whose intention is: to accelerate the development of new business technologies for IOTA and at the same time, generate a high-impact network with much more general use within the Shimmer Network, underpinned by the existence of the native $SMR token.

Shimmer Network Development

IOTA is a blockchain network with advanced technology and capabilities. Unlike blockchain networks like Bitcoin o Ethereum, the operation of IOTA is possible thanks to the use of what is known as Directed Acyclic Graph (Directed Acyclic Graph or DAG).

This structure offers a huge set of advantages to IOTA among which we have high speed, a great capacity for parallelism (simultaneous execution of several computational processes) and ease to integrate on less powerful hardware devices, since it does not use mining Proof of Work (PoW) for its funtionability.

However, IOTA has certain limitations regarding its total decentralization: the use of what is known as Coordinators or Coordinators, a series of special nodes that are in charge of monitoring the correct formation of the IOTA DAG and that have enormous weight in the network, to the point that their existence is considered a centralization point.

At IOTA they have been developing what is known as Coordicide, a series of improvements to the network that would lead them to leave the Coordinators in the past and make IOTA a fully decentralized network.

It was precisely this work that gave rise to a series of changes that made the Shimmer Network a reality on September 28, 2022, when its launch and start-up was announced. And it is that together with this announcement the roadmap of both networks was also revealed with one thing in common: the Coordicide would take place on the Shimmer Network and once stabilized, it would be applied to IOTA. Thus, officially, the Shimmer Network was born and became the IOTA Canary Network.

How Shimmer Network works

Shimmer Network uses the IOTA technological base for its operation, which includes the well-known Tangle technology. Tangle is the name of the IOTA DAG and, which in turn, is a central part of the Shimmer Network.

In a DAG Tangle, this structure is made up of the union of separate blocks, each of which stores some small change to the data. By including blocks in the tangle, the nodes agree on what the current state of the tangle is like.

To be included, each block must reference some older blocks y be referenced by a newer block. The more new blocks are pending, the wider the front will be and the more points there will be for the newer blocks to attach.

Using this structure together with an accounting model UTXO makes the Shimmer Network able to have its own native token (the $SMR token), while also allowing you to build a smart contract execution layer allowing not only the native token to exist, but specialized tokens to be generated.

ISC, smart contracts on Shimmer Network

The part that makes possible the generation of smart contracts in the Shimmer Network is known as IOTA Smart Contracts (ISC), and it is designed to be anchored in both IOTA and Shimmer and offer this functionality.

ISC is developed with the unique capabilities of the Shimmer and IOTA DAG Tangle in mind. For example, ISC allows anchor or join several networks each of them with its own computing power in order to parallelize and segment the execution of smart contracts and maximize their performance.

This means that ISC is a level 2 smart contract platform, in which just a committee of nodes spends resources executing the smart contracts of any chain that is anchored to the system.

Thanks to this, both IOTA and the Shimmer Network can be interconnected through smart contracts, and at the same time, Tangle-compatible networks can be designed that can join this system.

In any case, smart contracts are executed in federated systems whose use is separated from the main computing of the network and therefore congestion is not generated or its operation is affected. Thus, the network can enjoy the potential of smart contracts without affecting the other functionalities or increasing congestion fees within it.

Another advantage of ISC is the virtual machine that runs the code of the smart contract. ISC currently supports the use of en Rust/Wasm and Solidity/EVM. But in the future, it is expected to be able to support all kinds of virtual machines depending on the demand.

With ISC, the Shimmer Network gains tremendous flexibility allowing it to create utility tokens and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

Shimmer Network Ecosystem

The advent of smart contracts allows the Shimmer Network to generate a complete app ecosystem around you. Currently, Shimmer has up to 75 projects in development.

It may not seem like much, especially if we compare it with ecosystems like Ethereum or Polygon, but let's remember that Shimmer Network has barely been alive since the end of September 2022, and in such a short time it has already begun to have a significant community developing around it.

Among the projects we can find DeFi platforms, NFTs, DEXs, DAOs, infrastructure projects and even projects focused on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. All of them have come to the Shimmer Network for two powerful reasons:

1. Superior performance on your blockchain.
2. Low costs and even capacity feelless of its operation within the network

Other great features of Shimmer Network

Additionally, Shimmer Network offers:

1. A highly scalable distributed ledger. Shimmer's DAG is capable of scaling to higher transaction throughput with faster completion times (five seconds) than conventional Layer 1 blockchains. The state anchoring of ISC-implementing blockchains are connected (Layer 2) and parallelized , which allows networks to scale horizontally.
2. Allows generate native assets. You can create, mint and transfer assets natively in the protocol (Layer 1) at no cost. These assets are under your control and can be transferred freely and without friction to all chains and layers of the network.
3. Application layer with EVM and WASM support. Shimmer is a feature-rich smart contract platform that offers creators the option to build DApps on top of smart contract blockchains with EVM and/or WASM (Layer 2) support. Such a blockchain network can also support multiple and different VMs in parallel, allowing the creation of entirely new dApps and Web3 ecosystems.
4. High compatibility. Native, bridge-free asset transfers across the entire Shimmer ecosystem, including between sovereign blockchain networks anchored to Shimmer.
5. MEV protection and native randomness. Shimmer removes current network limitations such as front-running or sandwich attacks. In addition, the native randomization of the network is freely available to all DApps that make use of ISC, which eliminates the dependency on expensive third parties and trusted oracles. This is vital for building secure Dapps across the ecosystem.

SMR the Shimmer Network token

SMR is the native token of the Shimmer Network and is the backbone of the ecosystem economy and boasts a total supply of 1.813.620.509 tokens, which have been distributed among the early adopters who participated in the staking of MIOTA.

The token allows the appearance of a own economy and testing of new features while incentivizing early builders to explore new use cases.

At the same time, SMR also serves for the community government and it will be the base of any DAO that arises in the ecosystem.

Shimmer will also be the natural bridge between Layer 2 chains, which makes SMR the center of all economic activity that takes place between the different L2 chains.

The Shimmer token will also be the engine of the smart contracts that are created in the ecosystem, as well as the DApps and decentralized finance systems that are developed on top of the protocol.