Sirin Labs Reverses Course: From IOTA to Ethereum
Sirin Labs, known for its military-grade Solarin smartphone, announced in September of last year its first blockchain phone, FINNEY, originally powered by IOTA’s Tangle distributed ledger technology. However, the company has now made a U-turn. CEO Moshe Hogeg told foreign media, “We are not cooperating with IOTA. We thought it over and finally decided to choose a different path.” This decision immediately cast doubt on IOTA’s technical readiness and sparked concerns about potential defects in its protocol.
Temporary Ethereum Private Chain, Ultimate Transition to a Proprietary Blockchain
Chief Marketing Officer Nimrod May elaborated: “When FINNEY goes live, we will use the Ethereum blockchain and run it through full nodes hosted by Sirin Labs. From the moment we published the whitepaper, our plan has always been to migrate the SRN token and Sirin Labs ecosystem to the ‘next-generation blockchain’.” Notably, May hinted that FINNEY will process transactions via a series of full nodes hosted by Sirin Labs, implying the use of an Ethereum private chain rather than the mainnet, primarily to control transaction costs. He further stated that “Ethereum will not be FINNEY’s permanent home” due to transaction cost considerations; the final destination will be a blockchain “built for FINNEY” to enable ultra-low-cost micro-payments for phone users. However, deploying a mainnet could take considerable time. May noted that Sirin Labs has studied both IOTA and Cardano but continues searching for a suitable distributed ledger technology, even considering developing its own long-term blockchain solution.
Market Fallout: MIOTA Crashes 17.5%, Over $800 Million in Value Wiped Out
The sudden technology switch hammered market sentiment toward IOTA. According to CoinMarketCap, MIOTA plummeted nearly 17.5% on August 7, from a recent low of $0.6770 to around $0.70. Since July 29, MIOTA has lost over $800 million in market capitalization, threatening its top-10 ranking. At 2:30 PM Beijing time on August 8, MIOTA’s market cap stood at $1.96 billion, with a 24-hour trading volume of $71.27 million and a price of roughly $0.70. This incident highlights the inherent risk that commercial blockchain projects depend on underlying technology decisions: a sudden change can trigger violent token price swings.