Since our launch, PANDABYTE has experienced remarkable growth, rising swiftly to become one of the top validators on the IOTA Mainnet. This achievement would not have been possible without your trust, your votes, and your unwavering support. We extend our deepest gratitude to the entire IOTA community—each one of you has a right to feel proud of what we’ve built together.

Ensuring Reliability for 100% Delegators

Many of you have expressed a desire to stake 100% of your tokens with us, but have hesitated, concerned that any validator outage—even momentarily—could cause you to lose rewards for an entire voting epoch. Rest assured, PANDABYTE is fully committed to maximizing uptime. We reinvest the vast majority of our commission back into robust infrastructure—upgrading servers, enhancing network connectivity, and adopting best‑in‑class monitoring tools—to guarantee our nodes remain continuously available.

Introducing PANDABYTE II

To further bolster resilience and decentralization, we’re thrilled to announce PANDABYTE II—a second, geographically diverse validator on the IOTA Mainnet. Unlike our self‑hosted primary node, PANDABYTE II will run on external, professionally managed infrastructure.

What this means for you:

• Split Delegation: You can distribute your stake across two validators, minimizing risk of downtime and ensuring you never miss out on rewards.
• Greater Flexibility: With two independent sources of commission, we gain added leeway to optimize our fee structure—potentially passing savings back to you.

We see PANDABYTE II as a clear win‑win: a more resilient network for IOTA, and even better service for our delegators.

Why Now and Why We Waited

You might wonder why this expansion hasn’t been widely promoted until today. At present, only 50 validators can sit on the Mainnet Committee and earn rewards each epoch. Launching a second PANDABYTE node prematurely would have unseated another deserving validator—contrary to our mission of supporting and securing the network, not competing for slots.

Technically, you can already delegate to PANDABYTE II via our website, but doing so today would require approximately 6 million IOTA to reach committee threshold. We had anticipated that Protocol Version 9 would raise the validator limit from 50 to 80, easing entry; however, that upgrade has been rescheduled to Protocol Version 10, currently slated for deployment in mid‑August.

What’s Next?

With the imminent release of Protocol Version 9, we’re making this early announcement so you can plan your delegation strategy. As soon as committee slots expand, PANDABYTE II will be fully poised to join our primary node in securing the network—your support will be crucial once again.

Thank you for taking the time to read this update. We hope it has shed light on our roadmap and the motivations behind PANDABYTE II. Together, we’ll continue to drive IOTA’s decentralization, security, and long‑term success.

~ The PANDABYTE Team