Dev Status Update - April, 2021

Published by the IOTA dev team every month, this update will provide you with news and updates about our key projects! Please click here if you want to see the last status update.

The research department is also releasing a monthly update that you might want to read.

Chrysalis

Chrysalis is 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 were deployed to the mainnet in August. The engineering team is now working on Chrysalis phase 2.

We also advise everybody to read our blog post about "Security During Token Migration" to be ready for the network migration, starting on April 21.

Implementing Chrysalis phase 2

With Chrysalis just around the corner, the team is heads down in the final bits and pieces to make everything as smooth as possible both on April 21 and April 28. Tests are being run on multiple instances of infrastructure to test all the migration scenarios. We have also already deployed the Chrysalis Mainnet infrastructure that will replace the current Mainnet. This will be reset on the day of launch, April 28, and will turn the current Mainnet into legacy Mainnet.

Migration is being tested via Firefly builds in both an internal and external group of users (huge thanks to the X-Teams for that!).

We are super excited for the Chrysalis go-live. This truly will be a new beginning for the IOTA protocol. We are looking forward to seeing what you guys build on the protocol, and all the scenarios, deployments, and use cases that will pop up after Chrysalis. Chrysalis really is the most significant update in the history of IOTA.

If you want to follow all the news and updates on Chrysalis, make sure you visit the status page. The page will contain more information as we move closer to April 28.

Pollen

The team has released multiple versions of the Pollen testnet. Pollen 0.5.0 introduced our reputation system - mana. With the latest version 0.5.6. The nodes now come with a mana section integrated into the local dashboard, the pollen analyzer dashboard, and the Grafana dashboard. Access and consensus mana can now be pledged to specific node identities with GUI and CLI wallets.

You can read more about the update in last week’s research update and the different Mana release posts.

You can follow the project on its GitHub repository. If you want to get involved, check out our updated contributing guidelines.

Bee

The Bee team has released the first alpha of the Rust-based node for the Chrysalis network. For those interested, see the instructions on how you can run your Bee node.

The dashboard has been updated with authentication - via JWT - and the node has been prepared for the Chrysalis migration.

Most of the code is being properly documented, tested and merged to the dev branch of the repository.

For the rest of the Chrysalis functionality, the team implemented MQTT support, local snapshot and pruning and these features are being tested at the moment. The initial audit of the Bee crates has also been finished.

The team has also published new live coding sessions.

Hornet

The testing of the Chrysalis version of Hornet is ongoing. In the past month, the team has also made multiple changes and fixes to the node software, for example in DB revalidation, MQTT and more. We are also working on documentation for the Chrysalis version of Hornet.

Just like in Bee, the dashboard has been updated with authentication - via JWT

The Hornet team has also been working on caching improvements. These improvements will only be released after Chrysalis phase 2.

Smart contracts

The team has released the first major version of smart contracts early in March. Make sure you check the release post for more information. Since then, we have been heavily focused on refactoring the integration to reflect the latest changes in Pollen, as well as adding new output types to support ISCP on Layer 1.

You can follow the updates in the #smartcontracts-discussion and #smartcontracts-dev channels on Discord.

Stronghold

The beta of Stronghold has been published, refactored and is currently under external audit. The latest revision of the Vault cuts out 97% of the previous time to write/retrieve a record, and with the exception of writing a snapshot (which takes several milliseconds), all benchmarks are now using microseconds for measurements. We have also reduced the size of snapshots to about one-third of their former bulk.

We are working together with the IF cryptography team to identify methods for performing multisig using Stronghold’s internal libp2p-noise-based communication crate. Indeed, our primary focus now is on verifying and validating this crate and its processes.

Wallet

Firefly has been heavily tested for the past several weeks, with the team diligently fixing the bugs reported by the testing group. Most recently, we have been testing both internal and limited public builds of the migration version of Firefly. The migration version of Firefly supports both the pre-migration period that will start on April 21 and the fluid migration starting on April 28.

After Chrysalis, we aim to shift our focus to the mobile versions of wallet.

IOTA Identity

The Identity team has been joined by the Filancore team to further improve the quality of the repository and push it towards a beta version as soon as we can. With their help, IOTA Identity has now better testing coverage, improved documentation, better examples and runs on Chrysalis Phase 2. In addition, they have been working at speccing out the DID Communication (a standard from the Decentralized Identity Foundation) feature and implementing it in the framework.

Meanwhile, the team has been working on the Stronghold integration and the account module, massively improving the ease of use for the framework. We are also finishing up the DID Method Specification, for submission to the W3C DID Method Registry. All in all, it has been a very productive month with exciting improvements. We are likely going to withhold a release until after the Chrysalis update is live.

Chronicle

We already have a Chrysalis phase 2 version of Chronicle deployed on our test network. We will be releasing the new version of permanode so that everyone can deploy their own Chronicle on the new Chrysalis network.

IOTA Experience Team

Great progress this month by the IOTA Experience Team members.

Thanks to the IOTA community-driven Simplify X-Team the Discord reorganization has been completed. The channels are now structured in categories and the Discord roles colors have now a certain logic to them. The next steps are to look at ways to reduce “channel fatigue” from the long list of channels that the IOTA Discord offers.
Another tangible achievement is the updated IOTA All-in-one Thread on the IOTA subreddit that collects resources about IOTA, make sure to share it with newcomers to the IOTA community.

The Simplify X-Team proposed new goals like creating an IOTA description for exchanges/websites or creating an easy step-by-step guide for non Techs how to set up and run an IOTA Node, these goals are perfect for non-developers that want to contribute to the IOTA vision. Have a look at the list of goals here and join us!

X-Team members from different initiatives are testing the Firefly wallet and the Firefly Token Migration procedure to provide feedback on the user experience and are submitting issues to help the team catch bugs, propose enhancements and suggest improvements. Other IOTA community members are helping out with the internationalization of Firefly by translating the application. Join us on Crowdin and contribute to the adoption of Firefly by adding or verifying the translation in your first language.

The community-driven IOTA Identity X-Team is holding weekly meetings every Monday at 8pm CET, if you are interested in building digital identity solutions based on IOTA make sure to join the Experience Team and the meetings.

Last but not least for this month’s update:
If anyone in the IOTA community has a podcast setup or good mic and would like to start discussing a community-driven initiative get in touch!

The idea behind this initiative is a monthly podcast to talk about what the community loved and is posted to the #community-highlights channel on Discord.

A 5-10 minute podcast to listen to, while our community members are commuting or drinking coffee.

The goal is to extend the reach of what happened in the community and was found interesting by other community members, from the community for the community.

Join the discussion about this initiative in the #experience channel on Discord!

This month we welcome the latest members to the IOTA X-Teams:

Agi#5701, jvdhout#4402, merul.isAwesome()#2114, gman_IoTangle#7856 and Myhrmans#7816.

Everyone is invited to the IOTA Experience Teams to pave the road for IOTA to have the best experience in the DLT and IoT space. Read more about the IOTA Experience team in this blog post, discover the IOTA Experience Team on GitHub, explore the IOTA Experience Initiatives and then apply through this form.

Watch the previous X-Team meetings here on the IOTA Foundation YouTube channel.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!