Chrysalis (IOTA 1.5) Phase 1 Now Live on Mainnet

The first phase of IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) — the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide — is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis Phase 1 components have been deployed on the IOTA mainnet today. This is a major milestone for IOTA, and we would like to thank the community, the Hornet team and our partners for the support, contributions and last but not least, for upgrading to Hornet.

Chrysalis Phase 1 is a set of components improving the reliability, performance, and usability of the IOTA network. The components are based on Coordicide research. Thanks to Chrysalis, we are able to deliver some of these improvements to our existing network before IOTA 2.0.

Up until now, the network was only able to consistently handle Transactions per Second (TPS) in the 5 to 20 range. Nodes, especially those running older node software, would start to struggle above 40 TPS. With the whole network upgraded to Hornet nodes, improved tip selection and milestone selection algorithms, and the addition of white flag, the network is now able to support over 1000 TPS.

The same implementation that is now deployed on the mainnet has been able to reach 1500 TPS on our community testnet (comnet) during testing.

This improvement makes the IOTA networks capable of serving a significantly larger number of use cases and business partners simultaneously, bringing us one step closer to an enterprise-ready network.

The technological upgrades brought by Chrysalis components improve the network’s confirmation rate and maintain a high confirmation rate in scenarios in which the previous version of the network could not. This means that sending tokens from one address to another has become a much better experience. It also means that the vast majority of token transfers will, in most cases, not require promotion or reattachments.

The average confirmation time of transactions on the IOTA mainnet should now be at least 8 times faster than before. With milestones being issued every 10 seconds, instead of around 80 seconds, tokens should now go from one wallet to another in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. You can see the new confirmation speeds for the network here.

The white flag approach, implemented as part of Chrysalis Phase 1, completely negates some of the scenarios that impacted the confirmation rate in the previous network, such as conflict spams.

The algorithm also allows for much more efficiency with any tip selection algorithm that we use now or in the future. This makes the tip selection algorithm more lightweight, easier to tune and change. We expect that we might be further changing the tip selection algorithm in the future, for example, after Chrysalis Phase 2.

Node set-up and maintenance has never been easier. Running a node can be done with 4 commands viaAPT, or through Nuriel’s playbook. You can also check out our video on how to set up a Hornet node here. Nodes are more stable than ever before and should withstand higher TPS if run on appropriate hardware.

With autopeering, officially part of Chrysalis but released in Hornet a few months ago, you do not need to look for manual nodes to peer. We still recommend setting up manual peers if you run a node in a production environment.

If you run a node, make sure you upgrade to Hornet 0.5.0and restart it once with the — overwriteCooAddress command.

Please make sure to update your Trinity Desktop version. A Trinity Mobile update is also required but we are still awaiting reviews from Apple and Google.

The next big milestone on the path to Coordicide is Chrysalis Phase 2 — slated for release later this year. Work on Chrysalis Phase 2 began several months ago as RFC specifications. And development already began on some of the components, like the new wallet and client libraries. You can already find most of the specifications listed here.

This effort brings with it changes to every piece of the IOTA software, and will result in the support of a new signing scheme and with it reusable addresses, UTXO, new node API, new client library API, a brand new wallet for both desktop and mobile and more.

Chrysalis Phase 2 will conclude the development of IOTA 1.5 — our intermediary step to Coordicide and the work required to make the network enterprise-ready.