IOTA

At the 07:45 UTC epoch change on 2026-04-23, IOTA Mainnet switched from Mysticeti to Starfish. We are very happy with what we see in the first Mainnet metrics. Starfish shows the tradeoff we wanted to make. We designed it to make the protocol more robust and more predictable by reducing synchronization debt: fewer late pulls for missing history, fewer holes in the DAG, and better behavior in the slow cases. The cost is also visible: more steady communication / bandwidth, and slightly higher latency in the clean happy case because Starfish adds an availability step before sequencing. Blue = Mysticeti before the epoch change. Green = Starfish after the epoch change. Each chart has two panels: • Top: time series around the epoch change. • Bottom: ECDF after cooldown. ECDF stands for empirical cumulative distribution function. For a given value on the x-axis, the ECDF tells you what fraction of observations were at or below that value. The steeper and tighter the curve, the smaller the variance — and the more robust the system. 1. Commit latency The first graph shows internal commit latency: the consensus step. The top panel plots p50, p90, and p99 over time. For example, p99 means that 99% of observations are at or below that line, and 1% are above it. The main signal is the tail. The median improves a bit, but the p99 improves much more: roughly 486 ms → 312 ms. In the ECDF, the Starfish curve is tighter and the right tail is much shorter. This is exactly the robustness story we wanted to see: fewer slow commits, not just a slightly better average.