- Contrary to the expectation that Chrysalis phase 1 will be released on the mainnet in August, it has now been announced that the update for IOTA 1.5 will first be released in the Comnet testnet.
- The launch of Chrysalis on the mainnet may be delayed by “a few days/weeks” as further testing and audits are required.
There was some confusion within the IOTA community yesterday about whether the release of Chrysalis, also known as IOTA 1.5, will experience a delay. In IOTA’s Telegram channel co-founder Dominik Schiener wrote that Chrysalis phase 1 will be released “first on Comnet of course, then on mainnet”. Furthermore, as Schiener wrote, there will also be a security audit.
The discord community subsequently expressed their lack of understanding for Schiener’s statement. Based on a blog post about the release strategy of IOTA 1.5 from mid-May, pretty much the entire community assumed that Chrysalis phase 1 will be released in August and phase 2 in Mainnet by the end of October. But as it turned out now, these dates seem to be only valid for the release in the Comnet testnet.
After a big discussion about a bad communication policy on the part of the IOTA Foundation had flared up in the IOTA Discord, Dominik Schiener took the floor again. The IOTA co-founder made clear that Chrysalis will appear first in the Comnet testnet:
That screenshot from Telegram above literally says: it will first be deployed on the Comnet before going on the Mainnet, and that we will also do a security audit. I truly don’t get the hysteria here @Phiniut , when it is obvious that we need to be absolutely sure that what we developed works, has been audited and properly vetted through testing.
Launching such big changes already now on Comnet is amazing progress because it allows the entire community to actively participate in this new version of IOTA which is much more scalable and requires few to no reattachments. We are doing our best to meet the tight timelines we set forth. There’s no official communication yet because we still need to finish the changes themselves in Hornet.
Mr. Schiener also explained that all the times indicated on the IOTA Roadmap are not to be understood as deadlines, but only as a timetable. In the end, the tests and audits have a higher priority in order to guarantee a faultless mainnet:
Everything on the roadmap and in the communication is an assessment of how long it will take. We do not set them as deadlines by when we need to deliver else our heads will be chopped off by the community for being a week or two late. That is not how software development on such an important protocol is supposed to work.
Right now what is most important is that the changes in Hornet are near completion, they are going to be put on the Comnet and we will run thorough tests and audits to make sure that if we make the switch on the mainnet, that we are confident that nothing will break.
Via Twitter, Hans Moog, developer at the IOTA Foundation, also provided more clarity. As Moog explained, the audits and tests will take longer than expected. This will cause a slight delay, especially since the times given were only “estimated arrival times”:
It looks like the audit and the testing will take a bit longer than expected. But we are talking a few days / weeks extra and not like a huge delay. We are working very hard to stay as close to the roadmap as possible but sometimes there are unexpected things that cost you a few days (i.e. developers getting sick or technical issues that need to be sorted out).
That’s why these timelines are considered to be ETAs (estimated times of arrival) rather than hard dates. This is the biggest update of the IOTA protocol in years and you better be sure that everything is safe and sound. Jeopardizing the security of the network just to be able to make it in time is not worth it.
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