- According to a research update from the IOTA Foundation, Coordicide, GoShimmer and FPC are making great progress towards the launch of a first testnet.
- Due to IOTA’s focus on ‘0 value transactions’, the objects of the Tangle will be renamed from “transactions” to “messages”.
In a research update, the IOTA Foundation informed about the most important progress yesterday. The monthly updates are a tradition at IOTA to inform the community about the research progress on the one hand and the development progress on the other. In the new article, IOTA co-founder Serguei Popov focused on the research and wrote that there was recently a meeting for the naming of certain new Coordicide components.
What “may seem trivial” was indeed a challenging task “because of its importance and durability”, as both internal and external developers need to understand what is behind the product, as Popov stated. Thus, Popov’s statements also reflect the rebranding strategy of the IOTA Foundation, which was announced only two weeks ago.
A very interesting statement from Popov in this context was that the IOTA Foundation assumes that “the majority of traffic on the IOTA network will consist of ‘0 value transactions'”. As a result, it was decided to rename the objects on the Tangle from “transactions” to “messages”. With the next update in one month the renaming will be finished and published.
IOTA Coordicide, GoShimmer and FPC make great progress
Regarding Coordicide itself, a yellow paper is currently being drafted. In addition, the community’s testing of a first prototype of GoShimmer has been extremely helpful, and as a result, v0.1.3 has been released, which includes several bug fixes, improved autopeering and dashboard, and increased stability. In addition, the GoShimmer team has been working on version v0.2.0, which includes support for elliptical curve-based public key cryptography and binary hash functions.
According to Popov, the work on GoShimmer, the first implementation of Coordicide, is progressing well, so that the first testnet will be launched in a few weeks, after a first alpha version was launched in early February. In particular, great progress has been made in design by implementing a layer-based approach to the protocol. The first layer comprises the messages and other information about the node identity as well as a payload.
The second layer is a kind of interpretation layer on which the data (e.g. dRNG type, value transaction) is interpreted. Above this is the “application” layer, which ensures that applications can use the protocol. Another big step forward announced by Popov is the completion of the value transaction development branch and the UTXO model for GoShimmer.
On the networking development side, a first complete solution for managing network congestion has been completed. The results of “extensive” simulations show that “fairness is guaranteed and latency is limited”. Popov describes the solution as follows:
In particular, our proposed protocol is made up of two modules on top of rate control: (i) scheduling, which gives priority to transactions issued by certain nodes to share the throughput proportionally to mana; (ii) rate setting, which deals with local congestion, and it is inspired by AIMD.
With regard to Coordicide’s consensual protocol, FPC (Fast Probabilistic Consensus), further optimizations are underway, as Popov said:
In the FPC group, we continued to work on optimizations of the FPC. Simulation studies show that these adaptations decrease the failure rate at least one order of magnitude. […] The specifications of FPC are advanced and the remaining details will be decided in collaboration with the engineering team.
According to the roadmap of the IOTA Foundation, the release of the Coordicide testnet is planned in 4 phases, with the first phase being the “Incentivized Coordicide Testnet” planned for July 2020.
The full research update with even more details can be found under this link.
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