A recent comment by Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA (MIOTA) generated a heated discussion on Twitter and a possible FUD. However, this has been put to bed by a clarification by Schiener. It all started when Schiener commented on a complete rebranding of IOTA.

Completely rebranding of IOTA is Shimmer – New token, new brand, new narratives, and new focus (DeFi). No need for us to do that with IOTA.

Interestingly, Schiener’s position was misinterpreted by some enthusiasts. One user questioned whether IOTA is going to be abandoned for Shimmer. In his response, the co-founder explained that the project is not abandoned, but can now focus on its original mission without diluting its brand. This was further explained by a Twitter user identified as Moon Baklava.

🚨*#IOTA IS CANCELLED*🚨

1.*Atleast some act like this is the case.

Don't get a heart attack yet 💔

I will revive you back to life my friend.

Dom's recent statement has made some head's going confusing 😵‍💫

Unraveling continues in this photo thread…🧵 pic.twitter.com/UWt4I0Zn3o

— Moon Baklava (@moonbaklava) May 21, 2023

According to Baklava, Shimmer is meant to “go crazy in the crypto market” while IOTA focuses on its enterprise adoption.

In one of his comments, it was obvious Schiener is not comfortable with IOTA being used as a “meme-infested platform” which may end up damaging its reputation

He wrote:

IOTA would definitely have DeFi – it has to has to as it would be an important provider of liquidity and capital market. This would enable new industrial applications (e.g. tokenized private markets, trade, Finance, etc.). But we can’t have the degen stuff now on IOTA as that would ruin our brand and position in the market. This is why we have Shimmer now.

Schiener’s clarification on IOTA rebranding statement

He further stated that they need IOTA 2.0 and then make an education campaign for it. In addition, adoption to a certain stage is very much decoupled from technology. While Baklava admits that communication as this is very confusing, he believes that Schiener is making sense

Wrap it up: Actually everything is like the way before. We should focus on building and adoption! #IOTA 2.0 real life enterprise adoption. Welltested + serious #Defi and tokenization #Shimmer Early testing All early crypto usecases.

In another comment, Schiener clarified that his statement was misconstrued as he only answered someone who said IOTA needs rebranding. According to him, his comment was meant to inform that IOTA needs no rebranding as they have Shimmer already to do the “degen stuff” to protect its relations with governments and corporations

@Vrom14286662 Discord Screenshot #IOTA #Shimmer

All said to the latest (senseless) "drama"! pic.twitter.com/Z7Vf9BaZPP

— IOTA Tangle Network (@IotaTangleFacts) May 21, 2023

The Shimmer Network was launched on September 28th, 2022 as a staging network for IOTA. It operates as a layer 1 Innovation network transformed into a “parallelized multi-chain settlement layer for EVM and Wasm-based smart contract chains.” It enables the smooth deployment of the IOTA layer 2 smart contracts and smart contract chain, DApps, and Web3 capabilities before being implemented in the IOTA mainnet.

It is important to note that Shimmer is a multi-asset ledger that can keep track of the ownership of multiple assets. This is different from the operations of the Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains which track the ownership of a single digital asset.