IOTA Cryptocurrency Drops 41% Amid Rebased Upgrade

The IOTA cryptocurrency has experienced a significant decline in recent weeks, with its price dropping to $0.15, marking its lowest point since April 20. This downturn represents a 41% decrease from its peak this year and a 75% decline from its November 2024 highs. The price retreat aligns with the performance of other altcoins such as Solana (SOL) and Polkadot (DOT), and it coincides with the launch of the Rebased upgrade.

The Rebased upgrade introduced several new features, including smart contracts, staking, full decentralization, and a wallet transition. One of the key objectives of this upgrade was to enable developers to build decentralized applications using the Move and Ethereum Virtual Machines, leveraging IOTA's high scalability, which supports over 50,000 transactions per second and sub-second finality. However, despite these enhancements, third-party data indicates that the upgrade has not resulted in increased developer activity on the IOTA network. DeFi Llama tracks only one decentralized application (dApp) with a total value locked of $9.76 million, whereas newly launched chains like Unichain and Sonic have attracted tens of developers and millions of dollars in assets.

The number of active addresses and transactions on the IOTA network remains low. Over the past 30 days, transactions have dropped by 86% to just over 621,100, while the number of active addresses stands at 8,376. Despite this, IOTA’s staking pools have accumulated over $334 million in assets, resulting in a staking ratio of 45%. Investors in these pools are earning an annual APY of 13.47%, which is higher than most layer-1 and layer-2 chains.

Technical analysis of the IOTA price chart reveals a downward trend over the past few months, with the price dropping from a high of $0.6287 in November to $0.1595. Most recently, it declined from May’s high of $0.2746 following the Rebased upgrade. The IOTA price has moved below the 50-day Exponential Moving Average, indicating that bears are in control. However, there are signs of a potential bullish reversal, as the token is slowly forming a double-bottom pattern at $0.1315 with a neckline at $0.2746. This pattern is considered one of the most bullish reversal patterns in technical analysis. Additionally, IOTA has formed a falling wedge pattern, consisting of two falling and converging trendlines, suggesting a potential bullish breakout as long as it remains above the double-bottom point at $0.1314.