Dev Status Update - February, 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 mainnet in August. The engineering team is now working on Chrysalis phase 2.
Implementing Chrysalis phase 2
In December, we made the Chrysalis testnet open to the public. This allows us to test all the Chrysalis components in the open, as well as add the remaining capabilities and products to the mix. Many fixes have been introduced in the testnet in the past month. Most recently, we have updated the testnet with a Hornet version that support multiple message parents.
The Bee node has also joined the testnet with the first Bee node alpha implementation.
We are currently auditing Firefly, and once the wallet is in a satisfactory state, we will be releasing it as a public beta.
Pollen
The team is currently focusing on finalizing the Tangle refactoring prior to the integration of Mana. Improved components such as the solidifier, ledgerstate, booker, opinion former as well as the new scheduler are all part of the newly redesigned flow, core of the Coordicide protocol. We are planning to roll out this change within a short series of updates to the Pollen network and then incrementally shift towards Nectar starting from the Mana integration.
You can read more about Pollen, Nectar, and Honey, concepts we introduced to talk about the milestones on the path to Coordicide, in this post.
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.
For the rest of the Chrysalis functionality, the team is working on the local snapshots and MQTT support. The initial audit of the Bee crates has also finished.
The team has also published new live coding sessions.
Hornet
A new version of Hornet has been released on the Chrysalis testnet with changes such as multiple message parents. The team has also been working on several fixes regarding memory usage in conjunction with the used database engine.
The Hornet team has finished implementing the last Dust protection solution for Chrysalis, and is currently working on the Chrysalis migration support functionality.
You can already set up a Hornet on the public Chrysalis testnet. For example using the instructions from Svenger87#8523.
Smart contracts
The team is working on finishing up all the work necessary for releasing smart contracts alpha. Stay tuned for more updates soon, or sign up for the IOTA Smart Contracts Experience Team kick off meeting - more information in the IOTA Experience Team section below.
You can follow the updates in the #smartcontracts-discussion and #smartcontracts-dev channels on Discord.
Stronghold
With the conclusion of the macOS and Linux runtimes, the only blocker for our forthcoming Beta release in the coming weeks is our Windows allocator. Having all major desktop systems served by our memory allocator enables us to make stronger guarantees about memory safety for systems using Stronghold.
One of these desktop systems is that which is in active use by the Firefly team, and we are pleased to announce that early results of the auditors have allowed us opportunities to enhance our security model without sacrificing on performance or useability.
In the next few weeks we also expect to have our pull requests [1, 2] at Riker merged, which will enable us to include the firewalled communications actor in the beta release. For those of you invested in open source, these pull requests affirm our neverending allegiance to the greater community of open source projects upon which the foundation of IOTA is built.
Finally, work is progressing on our example desktop application, which we will use for verifying that the peer-to-peer communication layer is safe and feature complete. As a Tauri desktop app, it is already using two Tauri Plugins: tauri-stronghold and tauri-authentication. The former provides a simple JS interface to a local Stronghold snapshot, and the latter enables Yubikey ‘what I have’ type of physical presence user authentication. Both of these plugins will be publically available in the very near future.
Wallet
The wallet team has been working very hard to get Firefly ready for audit and is pleased to confirm that the desktop app has now been handed over to the auditors. The auditing takes on an interactive style where the auditors consult and report findings to the development team over a period of 10 days. In this way, the Firefly team can already start remediating any findings as and when they are made.
The app is in a solid state with the vast majority of the functionality implemented. We are now in the cleanup and polish phase, where we add any remaining missing functionality that wasn’t deemed important for audit, fix bugs and perfect the UI. Once the app is in the right state we’ll have a public beta.
IOTA Identity
The fresh new year gives the IOTA Identity team a nice opportunity to plan ahead and organize the further development. We are currently scoping the exact feature list for the set of releases bringing IOTA Identity from Alpha to a 1.0 Release. We have also planned our approach to improve the documentation, test coverage and transparency of the project. We look forward to a year with many major milestones, collaboration with the X-team and community, and adoption into agnostic identity frameworks and use cases.
From the technical side, the team has made important contributions to the Crypto.rs repository. They have successfully implemented fast authentication of identities with a rich history of updates and are currently developing another unique addition to the DID standard that enables credentials revocation with maximize privacy considerations.
IOTA Streams
Together with Dell Technologies, we have just released an update on the demonstration of project Alvarium, a Data Confidence Fabric re-engineered using IOTA Streams.
Chronicle
The Chronicle team is focusing on making Chronicle ready for Chrysalis phase 2. We have also extended the team recently to make Chronicle a bigger focus going forward. The team has also been heavily involved in strengthening the infrastructure that powers our explorer.
IOTA Experience Team
The Stronghold X-Team with Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, Senior Architect at the IOTA Foundation, kicked off the initiative and in case you missed it the meeting recording is available here on YouTube.
The upcoming Tuesday, 16th February 2021 at 6 PM (UTC) the IOTA Smart Contracts Experience Team kick off meeting will take place. Evaldas Drąsutis, ISCP (IOTA Smart Contract Protocol) lead at the IOTA Foundation, will engage with the Experience Team. Interested participants are encouraged to join the kick off meeting to discover the initiative and decide if they want to participate and contribute.
Let us know about your availability here
We welcome the latest members to the IOTA X-Teams: emanuelneher#8516, yagoa#5996, @avlo#7357 and @DinoDrill17#0317.
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!
Visit www.iota.org for more information.
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