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- In a status update, IOTA co-founder Serguei Popov reported that the Coordicide specifications are about to be handed over to the development team.
- In addition to Mana and the dRNG, a recent focus was on enabling the integration of the Fast Probabilistic Consensus (FPC) with value transactions, with Hans Moog completing the first successful transaction.
Via its monthly update on the state of research, the IOTA Foundation reported on its progress and had great news to announce this month. As Serguei Popov states in the update, the huge progress made in recent months has meant that the Coordicide specifications are close to being handed over to the development team:
The past month has been incredibly productive for us as we tie up the last few details around the Coordicide specifications. Handing over the Coordicide specifications to development will be a major milestone for our team.
Specifically, Popov’s team has made further progress in the area of GoShimmer implementation. The first Coordicide node software “GoShimmer” will test the consensus algorithm and some other Coordicide modules. According to the status update, the focus over the last month was on the integration of the Fast Probabilistic Consensus (FPC) with value transactions. Hans Moog, software developer from the IOTA Foundation, also reported yesterday that he successfully completed the first GoShimmer value transfer.
https://twitter.com/cryptot3c/status/1260827412532801536
As Popov further describes, great efforts were made to make the code more stable and cleaner. In addition, the concept of synchronization has been introduced, which allows nodes to check the synchronization status upon entry into the network. A brand-new Tangle visualizer has also been added to the GoShimmer dashboard.
In the FPC area, a research paper was submitted on an optimized version tailored for an environment where voting power is proportional to a node’s mana. Other new specifications have also been finalized, such as peer discovery and resynchronization. Improvements were also made in the area of networking, where the focus was on optimizing the performance of the congestion control algorithm:
The proposed scheduler is based on deficit round robin, which is lightweight and allows the protocol to achieve minimum delay, maximum utilization and weighted fairness (i.e. throughput proportional to mana).
As for the attack analysis, we have verified that a malicious node trying to exceed its allowed throughput will result in a delay for its own transactions, while honest transactions will be unaffected. As a consequence, malicious behaviors can be detected and penalized.
The random algorithm “dRNG”, which is still in research, has received a first version, with the current focus being on cooperation with the developers, who are contributing further optimizations. The results are to be published in the form of a scientific article. Regarding the solution Popov states:
Our solutions involve committee selection from high mana nodes (using a special “application” procedure). The committee then uses a threshold signature-based scheme to produce random numbers.
Popov’s team also encountered problems in integrating mana into auto peering with respect to low-mana nodes. However, a solution has been found for this, which will now be included in the specifications. At the protocol level, a simulation is planned for this month to test possible bottlenecks in message processing by nodes and to measure performance in different situations.
As announced a few weeks ago, the IOTA Foundation is also working on the rebranding of the new Coordicide components. Popov added on this: “We are working on the rebranding of the new Coordicide components:
A couple of follow-up discussions on this topic have been very productive, and a new naming scheme has been finalized. A blog post on this is forthcoming, and we look forward to having new, standardized language for all aspects of IOTA after Coordicide.
The full research update can be found under this link.
