May 15, 2023 4 min read

Behold: These are the Reasons "I'm Shimmering!"

It’s been a long road, but the Shimmer network launch is finally here. There are a wide range of projects that heard the call to build and have been diligently working in the shadows to utilize one of the many new features that Shimmer now offers. At long last the floodgates are wide open! In this article I will present some of the capabilities of the network that I find particularly noteworthy, but be advised: it’s not intended to be all-inclusive. Also, new features will be rolled out over time, so it’s possible that some elements mentioned may not be available right at launch.

First of all and perhaps most importantly, I am looking forward to the possibilities that smart contracts will bring to the IOTA ecosystem. The implications are so huge that an entire article could be written about them alone, but I will touch on a few here. The IOTA Smart Contract (ISC) framework that enables blockchains to be built on top of Shimmer will launch directly with Shimmer, but it won’t be feature-complete. The ShimmerEVM with Solidity support will be following a few weeks later, but builders can still experiment with their own EVM chain at their own risk until the public chain is available. Even after the launch of the IF-supported public EVM chain, Shimmer is still a staging network and will be experimental in nature as the bugs as worked out. Smart Contracts are needed for a host of ecosystem functionality, including Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) and Finance (DeFi), lending platforms, multi-sig wallets, cross-chain asset transfers, stablecoins, DAO tools, Login with IOTA, etc. There are new products beings built using smart contracts everyday, and the implications cannot be minimized. This truly is the future of distributed computing and we will finally be able to participate!

Next, NFTs will be first-class citizens on the new Shimmer network and will exist on Layer 1. Personally, I have supported several early projects through NFT purchases that were minted privately and outside of the Soonaverse. So, they’ve never really been tradable. This includes NFTs from The Fans Together, TangleLabs, Rusty Robots, and even my precious IOTAbot. I am really interested to see what the floor price of the IOTAbots will be when they are traded, but it would take a HUGE valuation to pry mine out of my hands! Other NFTs, like those from ZenTangle, haven’t been tradable either since there is currently no marketplace to trade them. Not only do I expect that many if not all of the NFTs mentioned above will soon be tradable, I know that new marketplaces will open with new features for traders as well. Also, to have all of these NFTs available in my FireFly wallet is an incredibly important feature to me. Let’s be honest, “Not Your Keys, Not Your Tokens” also applies to NFTs, and they should be secured just as vigilantly as you would your $IOTA or $SMR tokens. Finally, since NFTs can act as wallets and hold their own NFTs and tokens, this opens up new use cases for gaming that will be interesting to observe as the tech is adopted.

When discussing Shimmer, how could I not mention the upcoming “Shitcoin Renaissance”? Custom tokens are also first-class citizens in the Shimmer network, living on Layer 1 with NFTs and the $SMR token. This means that Native Tokens and NFTs can be moved around with the same speed and security as the $SMR token! There are a number of projects that I’ve supported that will be airdropping tokens to my Firefly wallet when they can: $RUST from the Rusty Robots, $LEXE from LendeXe, $SOON from SoonLabs, $BOLTS from IOTAbots, $BEES from DAOBee, $TFT tokens from The Fans Together, $IMCT from im.City, $ZENT from ZenTangle, $VOID from TangleSwap, etc. Wow! When the DEXs are live and all of these tokens are trading on the open market, it will be a very exciting time to be an early supporter of all of these projects. Have you supported any of these projects? If so, get ready for Shimmer to make it rain in your FireFly wallet!

Of course I’m also excited to finally have my real airdropped shimmies in my Firefly wallet. $SMR will soon be live on exchanges and I expect the price to be very volatile when trading opens. Still, let’s have some fun and speculate about where the price of $SMR might settle. Now this is pure speculation, so take it with a grain of Salt (shoutout to Kim!) As a staging network, Shimmer is often compared to PolkaDot’s staging network Kusama. Using the data from CoinMarketCap, I analyzed the ratios of the market capitalizations of Kusama to PolkaDot at different time frames. Soon after launch time when the price had settled a bit, Kusama’s MC was ~9.34% that of PolkaDot. At the time of writing this, IOTA’s MC was $787M. Assuming that $SMR will behave in a manner similar to $KSM, the MC of the Shimmer network would settle around $73.5M. With the new $SMR supply being 1813617965 SMR, this leads to a potential price of *drumroll*…. $0.041 per $SMR.

Now I’m not going to say that I wasn’t personally disappointed by the calculation above. I had hoped for more. But, we are in a bear market and the IOTA price itself is quite low by historical standards. And, I could be way off and the market may be willing to place a higher valuation on new staging networks after Kusama. At the end of the day this is still money that I will receive for simply holding the IOTA tokens I would have held anyway. And Kusama did more than a 10x from token launch to the peak of the bull market, so the future is quite bright if we simply hodl and wait for the market to recover. That’s my plan anyway! If IOTA does a 10x (or more) in the next bullrun, rest assured that Shimmer will follow right along with it. Also, the value of all of the airdropped tokens I’m expecting will take a bit of the sting out of the low $SMR price during the bear market.

Now that Shimmer is here, don’t forget that there is still so much to look forward to! While staking $SMR has been scrapped, at least the supply is fixed now and we will see the components of IOTA 2.0 (coordicide) being available to test much more quickly. Expect different modules to be rolled out over time and with each one we will be a step closer to a truly decentralized IOTA network. Each implementation is a nail in the coffin of the naysayers that doubt the vision that ties us all to this space. If you’ve been feeling sleepy during this bear hibernation phase of IOTA’s story, WAKE UP! Prepare to see the true potential of the network NOW!