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- IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø has clarified that Qubic is dead for the time being and that the focus of the IOTA Foundation is on the Tangle and on smart contracts.
- With the publication of a blog post, a proof of concept and the GitHub repositories this Monday, Qubic will come to an end.
Over the past weekend, a discussion broke out about whether the IOTA Foundation has abandoned one of its most anticipated projects, Qubic, which was supposed to add smart contracts, oracles and outsourced calculations to IOTA. After the IOTA Foundation presented a rebranding strategy last week that involved outsourcing the IOTA smart contracts from Qubic, it was not clear to the IOTA community what the future of Qubic would be.
Via Discord, IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø further unsettled the community last Friday when he replied to a community member asking what Qubic actually does and what it is being made for, saying:
JacQ that’s a good enough summary of where the Qubic project was headed, but now we are pivoting to focus on IOTA Smart Contracts which are less exotic and easier to bring adoption to.
However, Sønstebø realized the confusion and set up an “ask me anything” via Reddit to explain the differences between Qubic and IOTA smart contracts and talk about Qubic’s failed vision. Sønstebø argued that after the failure of JINN, which culminated in a public dispute and separation from former IOTA co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo, it did not make sense to invest further resources in Qubic. Instead, Sønstebø and the IOTA Foundation are now focusing on a broad adaptation of IOTA technology.
As for Qubic, a blog post and a proof of concept will be published today, and the GitHub repositories will be made public. This will (for now) put an end to the development of Qubic, according to Sønstebø:
IOTA Foundation has no plans to continue developing Qubic, no. If it happens that someone picks up on the work we have done and deliver, we will certainly look into collaborating, but at the moment it’s not a priority. It will start with the PoC and blog post on Monday. Everything IF has built of Qubic will be opened for curious CS enthusiasts.
IOTA smart contracts are the more promising solution
As Sønstebø also noted, outsourced calculations, oracles and conditional transactions/smart contracts are still part of the roadmap. “The main difference is essentially a clearer path both during development and later adaptation,” as Sønstebø stated. IOTA smart contracts, unlike Qubic, will be timely and immediately applicable in the “real world”, as the IOTA co-founder said:
[…] the contrary, a big motivation for this decision is to be able to bring Smart Contract abilities to the IOTA project in the near term, rather than being dependent on breakthroughs that need to be vetted and accepted over years. […]Currently, we are building a more traditional Smart Contract architecture that conforms to standards that are a lot more battle-tested and already has a lot of users (think WebAssembly). The goal here is to bring functional Smart Contracts to IOTA ASAP rather than spending precious resources on a much more ambitious and exotic project of inventing a completely new computational model
Sønstebø further clarified that the current focus of the IOTA Foundation is to leave the “pilot/PoC phase” of the IOTA Tangle and implement the technology in “products”. The IOTA smart contracts are an essential part of this, although they will initially appear in a slimmed down version:
Same goes for smart contracts, despite all the hype around smart contracts over the past ~5 years, most use cases do not need complex Turing Complete functionality at all. For the next 2-3 years, basic smart contract functionality is more than sufficient, and that’s precisely why we chose to deliver this. We want to build solutions to problems that there is a demand for.
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