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- The research department of the IOTA Foundation is close to finalizing the specifications for IOTA 2.0 in many areas.
- With the completion of two versions of Mana implementations an important milestone has been reached.
As Serguei Popov explained in a new update on the state of research, after the release of IOTA Pollen, the work on the completion and further integration of the research specifications in future updates continues. With Pollen, the first version of a fully decentralized test network based on GoShimmer v0.2.0 was released a week and a half ago. The release added new features such as Fast Probabilistic Consensus (FPC), Colored Coins, Prometheus and Grafana integration, and feeless dApps.
Since the release, the IOTA community tests have been able to find first bugs, as Popov states. Some of them were already fixed in the first minor release v0.2.1. In addition, further improvements will follow shortly. Besides GoShimmer, Popov also reported about another important milestone in the area of mana and autopeering. As is well known, Mana is used in the coordinator-free network to prevent sybil attacks.
Over the past month, two final versions of two types of mana implementations have been completed, meeting the primary research goals of the mana team. Popov explained on this point:
The mana specification has been revised and will be finalized by the next monthly update. We actually have two variants on how to do mana, and because of the modular nature of the protocol, either one would work. Thus we can leave the final decision about the final mana till later.
The specifications for the autopeering were also almost completed, with Popov expecting completion within the next month. According to Popov, the only thing to do is to type and publish the results. The focus of the network team last month was on the specifications for rate and congestion control. A preliminary version of the document is also close to completion, including details of implementation:
From an algorithmic perspective, our scheduler now also allows fairness in terms of delay, where propagation time for messages is independent of the mana of the issuing nodes (mana only determines nodes throughput).
Additionally, we have started investigating the possibility of having an adaptive global throughput which depends on the health of the nodes (the health of the nodes can refer to their capacity of process messages successfully without being overloaded or falling out of sync).
Regarding the random number generator (dRNG), the team has been writing academic papers with peer reviews in recent weeks. The first papers on this are about to be published. In addition to GoShimmer, the research department has also made great progress in the further technical specifications for all components of the protocol.
These specifications are the blueprints from which the engineering department will build the node software. Thus upon completing these specifications, research will transfer the Coordicide project to engineering for production. Each author is close to completing a good draft of each specification, representing the end of the first phase of specification.
