IOTA 2.0: Foundation Strengthened by Key Scientific Papers – Ledger, Consensus, and Networking

• The reality-based ledger paper for IOTA 2.0 maintains the flexibility to include address concurrent as well as conflicting transactions.
• In addition to the strong Tangle architecture, IOTA 2.0 needs to put equal emphasis on the UX in order to succeed.

The IOTA foundation team has been putting up a greater focus on the full-fledged development of IOTA 2.0 which will supposedly be a game-changer as per market analysts. Sebastian Mueller, a researcher at IOTA has put some light on the current developments.

He noted that the foundation of IOTA 2.0 relies on three crucial scientific papers, namely the Ledger Paper, the Consensus Paper, and the Networking Paper. Mueller also noted that all of these three papers have undergone rigorous peer-review.

Mueller clarified, that the assessment of the Ledger paper took more than a year, and they deeply appreciate our referees for their valuable input. This has also helped them to significantly enhance their work. Notably, some expressed doubts about the feasibility of our reality-based ledgers due to their inclusion of conflicting realities.

But contrary to these concerns, IOTA’s research confirms that monitoring these realities does not pose a bottleneck when compared to traditional total-ordering systems. A notable aspect of IOTA 2.0 is its reality-based ledger, which allows us to optimistically process not only causally independent or concurrent transactions but also conflicting ones by representing all potential realities.

The Good and Bad About IOTA

While IOTA has continued to have a vision for the future, the development has overall been slow with market players losing interest in the project. Job Borse founder Torsten Heissler said that since 2017, he has personally abandoned two projects on IOTA, as the protocol underwent frequent changes.

However, he adds that one thing that IOTA did right was continuing to research even when new approaches were complete;y discarded. Heissler writes:

If IOTA ever becomes successful and achieves Coordicide, NO ONE, absolutely NO ONE can claim they always knew IOTA would succeed. The IOTA of the past bears no resemblance to the potentially successful IOTA of the future. Can the project still fail after all this research? Of course. We haven’t seen IOTA 2.0 yet. However, on GitHub, it’s evident that intensive work is being done.

He further explains some of the challenges associated with IOTA. Currently, there are no smart contracts that fully utilize the benefits of the Tangle. Other challenges involve creating a seamless user experience (UX) that goes beyond using tools like the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with Metamask, as well as establishing reasonable tokenomics.

If IOTA has a powerful Tangle architecture but lacks a user-friendly UX or requires managing multiple currency units for a single transaction, it will struggle to gain the desired adoption, explained Heissler.

A senior software engineer at IOTA 2.0 recently noted that research would play a vital role in determining the technology robustness for IOTA 2.0, before its launch.