That was the problem IOTA’s founders set out to solve in 2015, back when a fridge ordering its own milk was still a thought experiment. Every payment system in existence charged a fee, and a fee of any size makes a thousand tiny machine payments pointless.

The strange part is where the design came from. Before IOTA there was Jinn, a venture building microprocessors that ran on ternary logic instead of binary - three states rather than two. IOTA existed so those processors could pay each other, which is why the total supply isn’t a round number chosen by economists. It’s 3³³, a value picked to suit hardware that never shipped.

The crowdsale closed at exactly 1,337 BTC, “leet” in hacker slang, and every token that would ever exist was sold in it. Nothing was held back for the team or a foundation, so the founders bought in alongside everyone else.

A decade later, the machines paying each other turned out not to be fridges at all. They were shipping containers. IOTA runs TWIN, a system for digitising trade documents that customs authorities actually use, and Kenyan flower exports move through it at around seven million stems a day.

Hi everyone! Long-time IOTA follower here.

Block explorers are great if you know what an object ID or a Move call is. Most people don't. So I built Simplorer: https://simplorer.app/iota

What it does:

- Every transaction told as a plain sentence, e.g. "Turing Certs notarized a document using IOTA Notarization"

- IOTA's apps (REAL Markets, Virtue, Pools Finance, TokenLabs and more): what they do, the money in them and what people did there lately

- Tokens and validators, explained without jargon

- English and German; besides IOTA it also covers Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and a few more

It's free, without ads or tracking cookies.

I'd love your feedback: what's unclear, what's missing, which transaction reads oddly? Paste any IOTA address or transaction into the search and tell me what you think.