Dev Status Update — July, 2020

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 see.

Chrysalis (also known as IOTA 1.5) is the Mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

Both Bee and Hornet teams are currently working on implementing Chrysalis phase 1 features. You can see the specifications in the linked RFCs, as well as comment and contribute yourself:

Weighted Uniform Random Tip Selection (Protocol RFC #8— Merged)
White Flag (Protocol RFC #5— Merged)
Milestone Merkle Validation (Protocol RFC #12)

We anticipate the Chrysalis phase 1 milestones to be ready once the development phase, together with the audit of the functionality, concludes for both Hornet and Bee. This will introduce the changes mentioned here to the IOTA Mainnet.

The Bee team is getting closer to release the first alpha version of the Rust node implementation together with Chrysalis phase 1. At this point, the team is moving components from the prototype implementation to the main Bee repository. Necessary crates are also being prepared for an external audit.

We are also putting together an approach that will allow us to easily prototype solutions in the future when the node software is released.

As mentioned previously, you can now find the merged Bee RFCs in the Bee RFC book.

The team has also been doing regular live stream coding sessions every Friday at 5PM CEST. The first coding sessions are available here. Join us for the next session!

You can find all Bee RFCs in their respective GitHub repository.

The team released an 0.4.1 version of Hornet. The Hornet team is now working on implementing Chrysalis phase 1 features for the next major version of Hornet. Specifically URTS and the White flag approach.

Previously, we released an Open Source Series Hornet installation video by Luca Moser that you can watch here. You can also watch the Hornet installation party video by Antonio Nardella as part of the IOTA Experience Team.

The last version of IRI, 1.8.6 has been released. As noted in this blog post, IRI 1.8.6 was the last release of IRI that we are actively planning. We encourage everyone to switch to Hornet in the upcoming weeks, but no later than with the release of Chrysalis phase 1 in the second half of July.

If you want to migrate your old IRI DB to Hornet so that you can retain history, you can use the following migration tool.

Last month, we released Pollen, the first testnet version based on GoShimmer to include Fast Probabilistic Consensus. The release had a great reception and the network now has more than 250 active nodes. The team has since released a minor version with a couple of fixes. We are now working on resolving a situation and coming up with a fix for synchronization issues between the nodes.

The team will also be planning the outstanding work necessary for the major release, Nectar. Nectar will include the rest of the missing Coordicide components, such as mana, rate control, adaptive PoW, just to mention a few.

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.

The team has been working on the virtual state, VM wrapper and abstraction logic, and will be working on the Wasm VM PoC in the pluggable framework of the Wasp node.

The team has also implemented the first hard coded smart contract. The hard coded smart contract will serve as a basis for testing the implementation of the whole approach, and the team will build a dashboard and tooling for it.

The team has mostly finalized the specifications of the new wallet that will be built for Chrysalis phase 2. We are now progressing with both the initial implementations of the wallet library and the library for secure store and management of private keys. We are also setting up the initial build continuous integration and delivery systems for both the desktop and mobile wallets that will support us throughout the actual development phase.

Streamlining the User Experience of the wallet is a continual area of focus since the initial inception of the project. The team is reworking all user flows, from the initial wallet entry, to strengthened security, ensuring they are as straightforward and easy to use as possible. Together, with that, we are also significantly evolving the initial designs of the wallet.

Trinity and Spark maintenance remain ongoing tasks but no new features are currently planned, and they will be deprecated with the launch of Chrysalis and the new wallet.

The Streams team is working on changes to the implementation that allow for functionality like multi-publisher support, as well as changing the existing processes into a binary form to improve performance on existing hardware. All the changes will be part of a larger release that we plan for August.

We have released a new implementation of the Permanode in Rust, Chronicle alpha 0.1 last week. This implementation supports the functionality that you know from the previous version and will be extended with a dashboard, solidification support, and more in the future.

The solution is highly customizable and extendable while making it simple to use with the CLI application. You can read more about the releasehere.

Or go directly to the documentation and the chronicle-discussion Discord channel.

We have made the following updates to our roadmap:

The IOTA Streams timeline has changed from July 2020 to August 2020. We have increased the scope of the next version and expect the next version to be ready in August.

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