IOTA (IOTA) Rallies 46% as Developers Open Voting Process to Upgrade the IOTA L1 Mainnet to the New Rebased Protocol

IOTA (IOTA) rose 46% in the last 24 hours to a six-month high of $0.504, bringing its market cap past $1.7 billion at press time.

IOTA (CRYPTO: IOTA) price surged on Saturday evening after developers opened the voting process to seven days for the community to decide on the fate of the IOTA L1 mainnet, which is slated to receive the Rebased protocol upgrade.

What Happened: According to a tweet by IOTA on Friday, the community members can now vote on whether to adopt the new L1 protocol, which will come with Move-based smart contracts, full decentralization, staking capabilities, and enhanced tokenomics.

The voting opened on Dec. 2 at 11:00 UTC and will conclude on Dec. 9 at 10:59 UTC. The counting process will begin immediately after the conclusion of the voting period.

The counting is expected to take seven days, and the results will be announced on Dec. 16 at 11:00 UTC. To participate in the voting process, users will need to connect their Firefly wallets to the governance page.

Why It Matters: The Rebased upgrade is touted to be IOTA's largest upgrade to date, introducing several key features to the network.

With the upgrade, IOTA will gain the ability to earn IOTA staking rewards, with an initial target inflation rate set between 6% to 7%.

The upgrade will also introduce support for deploying Move-based smart contracts on the IOTA ledger and fully decentralize the IOTA ledger.

Further, the IOTA Rebased upgrade is expected to reduce transaction costs, introduce an adaptive fee-burning mechanism, and implement sponsored transactions to abstract transaction fees.

The voting comes as the altcoin market is gaining momentum, which is evident from the Altcoin Season Index, which stood at 81, indicating that many altcoins are outperforming Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) in terms of price movements.

This surge aligns with heightened optimism in the cryptocurrency market, which is observed with the Crypto Fear and Greed Index at 76, signaling strong bullish sentiment prevailing in the market.

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What Next For IOTA Price? After IOTA's recent 46% surge, several analysts are now predicting more gains for the altcoin, which could be in the offing.

According to pseudo-anonymous analysts Team LAMBO Charts, IOTA has broken out of a large falling wedge pattern, which is a bullish signal in technical analysis, and has also breached a major resistance level at $0.40.

They are predicting that the altcoin could now surge to $0.70 in the short term, followed by a rally to $1, with a much more bullish mid-term target of $2.60 — which would represent a 430% hike from the current price level.

Meanwhile, another market commentator observed that IOTA has broken out after two years of accumulation. He anticipates further gains for the altcoin as whales are rotating their recent profits from other altcoins into IOTA.

Sharing a three-day price chart, he predicted that IOTA could rise to $3.50, provided it successfully breaches the $1 level in the short term.

On the daily chart, IOTA has moved above both the 50-day and 200-day Exponential Moving Averages at $0.1914 and $0.1710, respectively, which have recently formed a golden cross, which can be signaling a major upside for the altcoin in the near future.

However, the Relative Strength Index and the Stochastic Oscillator have reached overbought levels, which suggests that a pullback is likely. Therefore, the altcoin could be seen pulling back to retest the support at $0.30 before resuming its upward rally.

The next major resistance is at $1, a level IOTA failed to breach on two consecutive attempts in 2022. A breakout above this resistance could propel the altcoin to retest $1.49, its peak from December 2021.