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- The IOTA Foundation has released the beta version of IOTA Streams.
- Based on the reduction in library size, IOTA Streams will offer an almost 100-fold performance improvement to pave the way for embedding it in IoT solutions.
After having released the alpha version of Streams in February, the IOTA Foundation has now taken the next step and released the beta version yesterday. A release of version 1.0 is planned with the launch of Chrysalis phase 2, which is scheduled for November. The IOTA Foundation announced the release via Twitter:
IOTA Streams Alpha Update, Sept 2020 – We’ve made substantial progress w/ the team developing #IOTAStreams and the core code. Everybody is invited to test some of the new functionalities while we transition #IOTA Streams to beta.
IOTA Streams is a new and greatly improved version of MAM v0 (Masked Authenticated Messaging), which was introduced in November 2017. While the goal of MAM was merely to provide a solution for sending encrypted, unalterable and copyrighted data using the Tangle, IOTA Streams provides a framework for sending secure messages and data streams. It also provides a universal method for devices to communicate in a secure and private way on the Tangle and is said to bring “massive efficiency improvements”.
According to the current benchmarks of the IOTA Foundation, the new version results in “the size reduction of the new Streams library to a nearly 10X reduction in library size while having a near 100X improvement in performance based on resource constraints and processing time required.” This, according to the IOTA Foundation, paves the way for the embedding of IOTA streams in IoT solutions.
The switch to no-std enables the use of IOTA Streams in low power embedded devices, and also results in significant further size improvements, currently estimated at a 4–5x size reduction.
One of the most important improvements is also “a feature known as sequencing”, which was previously not enabled in MAM, but which helps to cover many of MAM’s utilities while adding more features. Basically, IOTA Streams will differentiate between two core versions of sequencing, “Single Branch” and “Multi Branch”, to reflect the arrangement of data in a channel.
With the “Single Branch”, in a channel with a single branch, all messages from all publishers within the channel are sent incrementally to a single branch. The “Multi Branch” feature is a more complex channel configuration that “use a branch as a point of reference, called the sequencing branch to map individual publishers to the one or more messaging branches found in the channel”.
With the beta version, the IOTA Foundation also asked for help with testing by the community:
We’d like to take this opportunity to gather feedback, and then adjust the upcoming specification and implementation as necessary, as defined in our roadmap. We also welcome others in the community to help develop the necessary Go, JavaScript and Python bindings.
For more details on how the new IOTA Streams beta version works, as well as all the new features, you can visit the IOTA blog.
