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- The IOTA Foundation has announced a new release strategy for IOTA 1.5, also known as Chrysalis. The release will take place in two phases until the end of October.
- Chrysalis will include major enhancements to make the IOTA Tangle technology ready for enterprise use.
After IOTA co-founder Serguei Popov had announced the day before yesterday that the specifications for Coordicide were close to completion and handover to the development department, the next bang followed. In a blog post published yesterday, the IOTA Foundation presented its roadmap for the rollout of Chrysalis, also known as IOTA 1.5 (Coordicide is also known as IOTA 2.0).
Even before the launch of Coordicide, Chrysalis is intended to bring the IOTA network to a level where companies can introduce the IOTA Tangle technology and develop applications based on it. In order to achieve this, a new strategy has been developed to meet the needs of the industry and existing partners. Via a blog post Jakub Cech, Head of Development at the IOTA Foundation, stated:
The IOTA mainnet has been operational since 2016 and so defining a new engineering strategy involves adapting our assumptions to industry feedback and demands. It also involves making difficult decisions to discontinue or redefine certain projects that are no longer feasible or relevant. At the core of this new strategy is an exclusive focus on technologies that will see adoption within a 2-year timeframe.
The goal of the IOTA Foundation is to “successfully specify, implement, test and upgrade IOTA mainnet and related technologies to this new version of the protocol in the next two quarters”. Explicitly, Chrysalis will do “most of the heavy work and migration for token holders” to achieve a smoother transition between Chrysalis and Coordicide.
In line with the new strategy, Chrysalis will bring four key benefits that will facilitate the adoption of IOTA Tangle technology: a simpler transition to Coordicide, significant performance improvements in the form of scalability to several hundred transactions per second (TPS), improved developer friendliness and accelerated business readiness of IOTA. Due to the complexity of the upgrade, the implementation of Chrysalis will be done in two phases.
IOTA Chrysalis: Phase 1 will be ready by early July, phase 2 by end of October
In the first phase, improved tip selection (URTS), milestone selection, white flag and auto peering will be implemented by early July. This phase requires an upgrade of all nodes, but no snapshot. Subsequently, the IOTA network will achieve, among other things, transaction confirmation times of about 10 seconds, a “significantly” higher data throughput (TPS) and general performance improvements for nodes.
The second phase is expected to be released in mainnet by the end of October and will include the new UTXO model, atomic transactions, reusable addresses (Ed25519), increased hardware support for all major architectures through more standard cryptography (EdDSA), and new features such as colored token. Phase 2 will require a snapshot to enable wallet users and exchanges to migrate to Chrysalis.
The complete transition will have far-reaching consequences for some IOTA components. For example, IRI, the previous standard node software of IOTA, will be discontinued. IRI v1.8.6 will be the last major version. In the future Hornet and Bee will replace IRI as the standard node software. Furthermore, the 5 different library implementations (JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java) will be shrunk for easier maintenance. The focus will be on Rust in the future.
We plan to provide functionality for other major programming languages through FFI and transpilation of the Rust library, without any significant performance decrease.
The Trinity wallet will remain the most important wallet. But the new core will be the wallet library written in Rust. Another new library based on Rust, Stronghold, “will enable ultra-secure secret handling and storage”.
Ultimately, Chrysalis will be the most comprehensive upgrade for IOTA to date, which will pave the way into the industry, as Jakub Cech concluded:
Chrysalis is the most promising series of upgrades made to IOTA yet. It is a major step for our enterprise-readiness, with increased transaction throughput, network stability, improved usability, and enables new features and use cases. The upcoming weeks and months are some of the most exciting in IOTA’s history. We are on a clear path towards IOTA’s adoption as an enabling technology for IoT and beyond.
The detailed description of the release concept of the IOTA Foundation can be found under this link.
