It would be ideal on trinary hardware, but it can work with a trinary emulator for now. I expect to see a Trinary chip very soon. CfB, one of the core devs of IOTA, founder of NXT and inventor of PoS has a team that has been working on Jinn (trinary cpu's) for the last 6 years.
So they're betting that it's the hardware of the future. And not something like the Mill CPU, which has been in development for much longer and it seems it will be able to execute all the millions pieces of existing software, faster and with less energy.
