IOTA in October 2026: A Restart at Rock Bottom
IOTA trades at around $0.050 - historic lows for the one-time top-10 coin. Yet the project has been technically overhauled: with the Rebased upgrade, IOTA switched to a MoveVM architecture with staking and smart contracts, leaving behind most of its old, bespoke Tangle architecture. Its strategic focus remains unchanged on industry and trade - from digital trade documentation in Africa to European infrastructure projects around digital identity and product passports.
Real use cases, but little market trust
IOTA's strength lies in solid partnerships with government agencies and trade organizations - use cases that don't need a meme narrative. The weaknesses are equally real: after years of technical restarts, the market has lost trust, the DeFi ecosystem on the new architecture is young and small, and staker emission is diluting supply. IOTA is a deeply discounted turnaround bet on industrial blockchain adoption, whose timeline notoriously runs longer than hoped.
The crypto market right now
Total value and sentiment of the market from our own charts. While the page is open, the values refresh at the pace of their source.
What is IOTA today?
IOTA launched in 2016 as a network for machine-to-machine payments and data, but since 5 May 2025 it has effectively been a different project. The IOTA Rebased upgrade retired the original Tangle and its central Coordinator and replaced them with a ledger built on the Move programming language, secured by elected validators under delegated proof of stake (IOTA Foundation). The long-promised removal of the Coordinator, known in the community as Coordicide, therefore arrived by a different route than originally planned. Since 23 April 2026 mainnet has run on the Starfish consensus protocol, and an EVM layer serves applications ported from Ethereum.
Strategically, IOTA has bet on global trade. Through the TWIN platform and the ADAPT initiative, trade documents, certificates of origin and company identities are meant to become digital and publicly verifiable, with Kenya, Nigeria and Morocco chosen as the first countries (Q2 2026 progress report). The IOTA token pays network fees and secures the chain through staking, which puts one question at the centre of any forecast: will demand for the token grow faster than its supply?
IOTA by the numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Current price | $0.060259 |
| Market cap | $281,700,000 |
| Circulating supply | about 4.67 billion IOTA as of 30 Sep 2026 (CoinGecko) |
| Total supply | about 4.99 billion IOTA, no hard cap |
| New tokens from staking | 767,000 per day, roughly 280 million a year or about 5.6% of today's supply |
| Ecosystem fund | 1.82 billion IOTA from the Stardust upgrade of 4 Oct 2023, vesting over four years |
| All-time high | $5.25 on 18 Dec 2017 (CoinGecko) |
| All-time low | $0.031 on 31 Jul 2026 (CoinGecko) |
| 2026 high and low | $0.137 on 8 Jan, $0.031 on 31 Jul |
| Q3 2026 | from $0.035 to $0.053, up 50.3% |
| Since the Rebased launch | down 74.5% from $0.207 on 5 May 2025 |
| Market cap rank | 168 (CoinGecko, 30 Sep 2026) |
Price data from Binance IOTA/USDT daily candles, for 2017 from Bitfinex IOT/USD; supply figures from CoinGecko and the IOTA Foundation's tokenomics page.
Staking and inflation: why supply drives the price
Since Rebased, up to 767,000 new IOTA are minted every day. They go to validators and to every holder who delegates tokens to a validator from their wallet. Stakers therefore keep roughly the same share of the network, while holders who do not stake are diluted year after year. Over twelve months that adds up to about 280 million tokens. Because the daily amount is fixed, the percentage shrinks slowly as supply grows; by the end of 2030 supply should be around 6.2 billion IOTA.
Fee burning works against this issuance, but so far it is tiny. According to the IOTA Foundation, notarising one document in Argentina's transplant registry costs about 0.006 IOTA. Even if every fee were burned in full, the network would need around 128 million such transactions a day just to offset new issuance. For the price this means market cap has to grow by a little over 5% a year simply for each token to hold its value.
What actually moves the IOTA price
Three forces have mattered more than any chart level. First, the broader market: as a small cap, IOTA usually falls much harder than Bitcoin in weak phases, as 2025 showed with a 71.2% loss. Second, evidence of real-world use by public bodies: the 50.3% gain in Q3 2026 came in the weeks when Argentina's transplant authority went public with its IOTA deployment. Third, supply: on top of staking issuance, tokens from the ecosystem fund keep reaching the market until autumn 2027 (vesting schedule).
The metrics we watch for IOTA
- Production use, not memoranda: Does a country actually process trade documents at scale on IOTA, or does it stay a pilot?
- Burned fees versus new tokens: As long as burning offsets only a fraction of the 767,000 daily tokens, supply keeps growing unchecked.
- Share of IOTA staked: If it falls, rewards are being sold rather than held, which weighs on the price.
- Application security: The Switchboard price feed outage in late August showed how fragile the young DeFi scene on IOTA still is.
IOTA news: what happened in 2026
- Argentina: Since 10 June 2026, the national transplant authority INCUCAI and its 24 provincial agencies have signed waiting-list documents with IOTA Identity and IOTA Notarization. Only hashes go on-chain, no patient data (IOTA Foundation).
- Price feeds: Since late July the network has been connected to Pyth Pro, which offers more than 3,000 feeds covering equities, commodities, FX and crypto; applications had until 18 August to migrate (IOTA Foundation).
- Switchboard incident: On 29 August 2026 the oracle provider Switchboard halted its feeds on IOTA, Sui, Aptos and Movement after a compromised key was used to push an IOTA price of ten million dollars. The chain itself kept running; the damage hit applications that relied on those prices. Full story: Switchboard oracle compromised.
- Technology: Starfish went live on mainnet on 23 April, and Q2 added account abstraction plus rebuilt SDKs for Python, Kotlin, Go, Swift and more (Q2 2026 progress report).
IOTA price history since 2017
The table shows yearly values in US dollars. Two patterns stand out. Every record year was followed by a crash of close to 90%, after 2017 just as after 2021. And IOTA has not touched one dollar since 10 February 2022; in 2025 it lost 71.2% even though that year brought the biggest technical overhaul in the project's history.
| Year | Open | High | Low | Close |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 (from 13 Jun) | 0.53 | 5.80 | 0.14 | 3.51 |
| 2018 | 3.51 | 4.50 | 0.20 | 0.35 |
| 2019 | 0.35 | 0.56 | 0.15 | 0.16 |
| 2020 | 0.16 | 0.45 | 0.053 | 0.30 |
| 2021 | 0.30 | 2.68 | 0.28 | 1.37 |
| 2022 | 1.37 | 1.43 | 0.16 | 0.17 |
| 2023 | 0.17 | 0.37 | 0.13 | 0.31 |
| 2024 | 0.31 | 0.63 | 0.10 | 0.28 |
| 2025 | 0.28 | 0.43 | 0.076 | 0.081 |
| 2026 (to 30 Sep) | 0.081 | 0.137 | 0.031 | 0.053 |
The Bitfinex daily high of $5.80 in December 2017 sits above CoinGecko's all-time high because CoinGecko averages across many exchanges.
IOTA in October: what the data since 2017 says
October has mostly been a weak month for IOTA. Of the nine Octobers since trading began in June 2017, three closed higher and six lower, with an average of minus 8.1% and a median of minus 10.4%. The best was 2021 at plus 28.4%, the worst 2017 at minus 37.1%. That is no rule: with only nine data points, a single event such as the market crash of 10 October 2025, when IOTA briefly dropped to $0.076, shapes the entire average.
IOTA enters October 2026 after a third quarter up 50.3% and a September up 32.6%. The quarterly high was $0.057 on 28 September, the low $0.031 on 31 July.
| October | Monthly change |
|---|---|
| 2017 | -37.1 % |
| 2018 | -17.7 % |
| 2019 | +2.4 % |
| 2020 | -10.4 % |
| 2021 | +28.4 % |
| 2022 | -10.3 % |
| 2023 | +5.0 % |
| 2024 | -16.5 % |
| 2025 | -16.8 % |
Three IOTA scenarios: bear, base and bull
Our model starts from the price at the beginning of the year and runs three paths. They differ mainly in whether demand for IOTA grows faster than the number of tokens.
| Scenario | 2027 | 2030 | 2033 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bear case | $0.023675 | $0.0094639 | $0.0063711 |
| Base case | $0.061139 | $0.076197 | $0.095986 |
| Bull case | $0.13291 | $0.36316 | $0.71421 |
Bear case: The trade projects stay in pilot mode, daily issuance meets little demand, and IOTA keeps sliding down the rankings. IOTA would then trade at $0.0094639 in 2030.
Base case: A few countries use IOTA for everyday trade paperwork and market cap grows, but barely faster than supply. The model arrives at $0.076197 for 2030.
Bull case: ADAPT becomes the standard in several African states, more public bodies follow Argentina, and the wider market rises. That would put $0.36316 within reach in 2030 and $0.71421 in 2033.
How we weight technical analysis, supply and adoption for IOTA is explained in the methodology section of this page. In short: for IOTA, verifiable usage counts for more than any chart signal.
Is IOTA dead?
Not as a network: mainnet keeps producing blocks, the foundation publishes quarterly progress reports, and a national authority runs a production system on it. As an investment the picture is bleaker. IOTA set its all-time low in July 2026, trades about 99% below its 2017 record and ranks only 168th. Whether IOTA can still explode therefore depends less on the technology than on demand for the token. Our wider view on struggling coins is in Top 5 crypto coins that are almost dead in 2026.
Can IOTA reach $1? And what about $100?
With about 4.99 billion tokens, a price of $1 implies a market cap of roughly $5 billion, about twenty times the valuation at the end of September 2026. Because supply grows to around 6.2 billion by the end of 2030, the same dollar would then require $6.2 billion. A price of $100 would mean about $620 billion, some 2,500 times today's value, which none of our scenarios supports. Even the bull case puts IOTA at $0.71421 in 2033.
Where this forecast could go wrong
On the upside: if a large trade bloc such as the African Continental Free Trade Area really runs customs paperwork on IOTA and companies have to buy and lock tokens to do so, our model does not capture that demand. On the downside: if governments and trade networks end up choosing private systems or other blockchains, IOTA loses exactly the use case the foundation has pursued for years. Another incident like Switchboard could also set back an already small DeFi ecosystem.
How to buy and stake IOTA
IOTA is listed on several major exchanges. Our crypto exchange comparison covers fees and licensing, and the list of regulated exchanges shows which providers hold a MiCA licence. Long-term holders can delegate IOTA to a validator from the official wallet and earn a share of new tokens without handing their coins to an exchange.
Related forecasts: Hedera and Stellar also target low-cost transactions for businesses, VeChain focuses on supply chains, and Sui shares IOTA's Move programming language.
