The Iota Foundation has announced the release of its beta version smart contract functionality, with the objective to solve marketplace challenges of scalability limitations and high transaction fees, as well as reportedly debuting components not witnessed thus far in the space.

Iota's nonprofit foundation is focused on open-source research and evolution initiatives to drive adoption in the distributed ledger engineering science space, alongside its native platform, the Tangle.

The smart contract service will foster interoperability and standardization through the integration of Ethereum Virtual Automobile; multi-chapters for developers to write plan languages with Tiny Get, Rust, and Ethereum's Solidity; as well every bit enabling developers to mark unique execution fees, among other features.

The latter is a prominent departure from the Ethereum blockchain and could drastically foster the reduction of fees across the network, every bit the puddle of competitors seeking to validate the smart contract increases.

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In March, the platform appear the release of its blastoff Iota Smart Contracts Protocol, designed to encourage developers to build smart contracts in add-on to decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) applications.

Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chairman of the Iota Foundation, told Cointelegraph that the improver of smart contract functionality will "add a vital component to the Iota ecosystem. They allow anyone to build composable and circuitous dApps using industry standard Ethereum tooling while relying on a feeless base of operations layer and predictable, low execution fees."

"IOTA Smart Contracts also enable the feeless transfer of assets beyond chains, which offers the IOTA ecosystem — and anyone else interested — unprecedented opportunities in terms of utility, composability, and scalability," Schiener said.

Schiener claimed that Iota smart contracts are unique in that they offer low, anticipated, transparent fees, adding: "Smart contract chains enjoy permissionless deployment, without setup fees, auctions, or gatekeepers of any kind. The smart contract execution fees are anticipated, non-volatile, and entirely up to the chain owner to set up."

"The possibility for chains to compete for the 'work' of executing a smart contract creates an additional incentive to push execution fees to their absolute minimum — including zero. Not-zero fees are payable in whatever course the chain owner demands, giving additional flexibility. In a nutshell, it is a DeFi operator'due south 'wet dream'."