Dom reveals stablecoins are an “obvious option,” update on ISCP

• Stablecoins are an “obvious option” for IOTA, with the foundation already talking to several stablecoin providers.
• A specific timeline for the launch of the ISCP has not yet been determined. The “main bottleneck” will be the integration of BLS signatures into the mainnet.

IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener (“Dom”) again took the time to answer the community’s questions in an AMA yesterday. Probably the most exciting questions this time were about smart contracts, Coordicide, governance and stablecoins on IOTA. Regarding the latter, Schiener revealed that the IOTA Foundation has already spoken with several stablecoin providers. However, a requirement is the rollout of the IOTA Smart Contract Protocol (ISCP):

We spoke with several stablecoin providers. I think, once we are ready, I think we will see stablecoins on IOTA and on ISCP. It’s kind of an obvious option […] and many of them want to be represented on multiple ledgers. So yeah, we quite close with Bitfinex. They are also supporting Chrysalis. […] It’s only a matter of having smart contracts.

Another important question from the community concerned the launch of the smart contracts. Dom noted that ISCP will apparently not launch with Chrysalis phase 2. Currently, the IOTA Foundation is updating the RFC. Afterwards these changes will be implement in GoShimmer for extensive testing. After that, the ISCP can be published on the mainnet, although there is currently no timeline.

The “main bottleneck” for the ISCP will be the integration of BLS signatures into the mainnet, as Dom stated. These are central to the functionality of committees in the context of smart contracts. BLS is also referred to as “threshold cryptography” because a certain number of signatures, i.e., the threshold, must come together before consensus can be reached by the committees.

“Our objective is definitely to do it as soon as possible,” with Dom expecting digital assets to appear on the mainnet before smart contracts.

At the same time, Schiener stressed that developers and businesses no longer have to wait. As CNF reported, those very same ones can already start developing applications with GoShimmer and the Nectar testnet, as the implementations of the node software and libraries on the mainnet will be “roughly the same” and will not require major changes to port to the mainnet.

What will IOTA’s governance look like in the future?

A long-term important question concerned the future development of a governance structure for IOTA. Dom revealed that this topic is currently being researched. Some of the most exciting applications of smart contracts have to do with governance, such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), Schiener said.

Because of this, the IOTA Foundation wants to “position itself in the middle of this research on new governance approaches” and collaborate with universities and ecosystem developers. In terms of smart contract protocol governance, the IOTA Foundation aims to implement something similar to Polkadot and Tezos:

[…] where you have a self-governing system, where when you make a decision in the smart contract network you can automatically enforce it. We will talk more about that in the future.

But in terms of layer 1, he said, this is more difficult because there are no smart contracts. The ultimate consensus there are that nodes update to the latest software. So the way the IOTA Foundation is dealing with governance at this point is more of a “human layer” with a “clearly defined RFC process”.

Last but not least, the question about the current status of Ubirch’s vaccination passport in Germany came up again. However, Dom could not reveal anything new about it:

No, not right now. We are going to hear something from them in the near future, but they are limited by contractual agreements with the government. It is a very sensitive topic. It is up to them what they want to communicate.