IOTA Foundation's Q3 2026 report confirms Starfish-Speed consensus upgrade reached mainnet in September, node sync accelerated 2.6×, and Argentina's INCUCAI moved institutional identities onchain.

IOTA Foundation published its Q3 2026 progress report on October 13, 2026, confirming that the Starfish-Speed consensus upgrade reached mainnet in September 2026, node synchronization became 2.6 times faster, and Argentina's national organ-transplant authority moved institutional identities onto the IOTA network. The report covers July through September 2026.

Starfish-Speed, an upgrade to the Starfish consensus protocol, is now live on mainnet, according to the October 13, 2026 report from IOTA Foundation. When network conditions allow, validators commit a block one round earlier, enabling transactions to reach finality sooner. The upgrade ran on devnet in July 2026 and testnet in August 2026 before reaching mainnet in September 2026, though the foundation did not specify the exact activation day.

Starfish-Speed is an optimistic transaction-sequencing extension to the base Starfish protocol that went live on IOTA mainnet on April 23, 2026. The Speed extension adds strong votes: validators attest that they possess both the leader's complete payload and every payload the leader acknowledges. A quorum of 2f+1 strong votes supports a strong quorum certificate, allowing optimistic sequencing to include acknowledged payloads at commit time instead of waiting an additional data-availability round. If optimistic conditions fail, timeout and standard-commit mechanisms revert to base-Starfish behavior.

The IIP-12 specification reports that in a 19-validator comparison, median transaction commit latency fell from approximately 206 milliseconds to 174 milliseconds, roughly a 15 percent improvement, while median block commit latency remained approximately 181 milliseconds.

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