What are timestamps and how are they connected to smart contracts?

In case anyone stumbles upon this page - we (peaq) are not building an ERC20 on top of IOTA and will never be doing so.

Smart Contracts

The transactions of e.g. Ethereum have a fixed order becaue they are in a blockchain. Because IOTA stores it's transactions in the Tangle, we don't have a sequence. In order to execute smart contract consistency is required. To achieve something similar on IOTA, mandatory timestamps are necessary.

Mandatory timestamps

You can already send timestamps with your transactions but it's not enforced, just arbitrary. Timestamps will be mandatory soon™ (We don't know when exactly) and when they are smart contracts will be possible to some extent.

IOTA may never be capable of as complex smart contracts as in Ethereum, but we will definitely see something similar to it.

ICO Tokens

Nakamo.to is working on something similar to ERC-20 Tokens (Ethereum) for IOTA.
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