Dev Status Update July 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.

Chrysalis

It’s been a couple months since the successful release Chrysalis on the mainnet. You can read all about the release here. So far, over 48% of all tokens have been migrated to the new network!

The engineering department is now focused on shifting its efforts to Coordicide - with several engineers having joined in on the effort since Chrysalis. We have also made strides in all our other projects, such as Streams, Identity, Chronicle, as well as Smart contracts and Ledger support for our Firefly wallet - which is currently going through rigorous testing. You can read more about the projects below.

IOTA 2.0 Devnet

Following the successful release of the IOTA 2.0 DevNet in early June, the team has been focusing on optimizations, for example to the congestion control algorithm, and putting more focus on concepts like Data Sharding. We were also able to identify fixes to be made to some of the components, like FCoB, thanks to the use of the DevNet. You can read more about this in the last research update.

To learn more about the IOTA 2.0 DevNet, check the new website, the Tangle explorer, and the developer documentation.

Bee

The Bee team has released the 0.1.0 version of the node software with the Chrysalis release and has since been working on fixes and improvements to the node software, as well as releasing an 0.1.2 version of Bee. The team is also preparing the work for a Rust version of the coordicide node, reusing and improving on the components of the Chrysalis version, but also implementing the new message and payload layouts as well as implementing a first network layer compatible with GoShimmer. A new documentation portal for the bee node has just been released and will be updated and completed over time http://bee.docs.iota.org/.

Hornet

Hornet has proven to be a stable backbone of the IOTA mainnet, even more so after the Chrysalis release. In the past month, the team has released version 1.0.3 of Hornet which added a new public for specific milestone ranges.

Smart contracts

The IOTA Smart Contract Protocol team is currently working towards the next release which will bring programmable smart contracts to the IOTA 2.0 DevNet, formerly known as Nectar. All functional components for the next release have been implemented and for now it's mainly down to polishing the codebase before this new release. The current build has already successfully been tested on the IOTA 2.0 DevNet and even a crude working version of the EVM support was added, this integration will further evolve over the coming months. The team is now primarily focusing on testing, developer experience, documentation and small improvements to the codebase as a result of the testing sessions. Once satisfied with the outcome of these remaining tasks we'll announce a new version of ISCP running on IOTA 2.0 DevNet which can be tested out by anyone interested.

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

Stronghold

Due to maintenance issues of the Riker Actor Model crate, we made the hard decision to move Stronghold’s client crate to Actix / Tokio. While porting took more effort than originally expected, we are pleased that this revision also solves the logging issues that Riker is known for and additionally streamlines the system. Making Stronghold smaller and more performant. Additionally, the Communication crate has been renamed to P2P, to reflect its nature. When the move to Actix is complete, the final touches on the P2P actor interface will be finalised and we will release it as Beta.

We would also like to take the opportunity to thank Tensor for the amazing job he did building out Stronghold and warmly recommend everyone to visit his Youtube channel and follow him there, because he will soon be publishing video tutorials about how to use and interact with Strongholds.

Wallet

The Firefly Team has been exclusively focussing on the Ledger Nano integration this month. Progress has been steady and lots of work has gone into making sure the user experience during migration and during wallet use is up to our high standards. The team is currently testing more obscure migration flows (e.g. bundle mining and funds spread across many addresses at varying indexes) with the closed testing group. Meanwhile, the team has been expanding with 3 new devs joining us. Once Ledger is over the line the team will be shifting attention to the mobile app. The designs for the mobile app are complete and we can't wait to get started.

IOTA Identity

The Identity team has yet again been expanded with two more members: Craig Bester and Abdulrahim Al Methiab, strengthening the team with another Rust developer and full-stack developer for tooling and demonstrations. With our next goal for a release candidate for IOTA Identity, we have started development of the Identity actor, a program that “speaks identity” between different entities, a more in-depth explanation about this will soon be shared. We already got a PoC working where two identities can speak to each other between the web and desktop environments.

In addition, we have improved our transparency and onboarding to the project. We will soon go live with our new documentation portal, although the content will be far from incomplete. In addition, we have opened up several public Kanban boards to showcase our progress in our short term goals (towards IOTA Identity 1.0) and our long-term goals for the next couple of years.

Chronicle

The team has been busy making fixes to the Chrysalis version of Chronicle. We are now working on a specification for the selective permanode functionality. Once we have a design we are satisfied with, we will share it externally for further input.

IOTA Experience Team

July is almost over so let us have a look at what the X-Teams share this month

X-Team member Stefan Braun from IOTA.php started July with the Λlpha Version 0.2.2 and 0.2.3 of the 100% community driven IOTA PHP library, available here. Support the project by following IOTA.php on Twitter and adding a star to the repository on GitHub!

The IOTA Foundation User Experience team received valuable feedback from the X-Teams in regards to the IOTA Tangle Explorer which will be taken in consideration for future changes in how the information is presented in the Explorer.

A call to all X-Team developers was published by adamski, support the community wiki initiative by looking over the code in the repository. Jeroen van den Hout is making great progress with the Docusaurus plug-in. It is a markdown editor for Docusaurus content using GitHub to commit any progress and allow contributors to create a pull request to the upstream repository without the need to know markdown or GitHub. The repository is available here, we welcome all developers that would like to support Jeroen in this endeavour.

The 100% X-Team driven Identity initiative continues with the tradition to meet every Monday at 8PM CEST. Make sure to join the next call on the IOTA Discord.

IF and Identity X-Team members joined forces during the Sovereign Nature Initiative part of the Odyssey Hackathon Challenge. The Identitree team hacked a Demo application to create CO2 Certificates with a verifiable credential in a NFT. To learn more about it watch the pitch on YouTube and find the code here.

Alexa99 recently joined the X-Teams and released the Pay with IOTA plug-in for Wordpress. This plugin lets you easily insert this button anywhere on your WordPress site. Whether in an article, on a page or as a widget.

The IOTA Foundation published a tweet to invite community members to join the IOTA Experience Teams. Some applicants shared their Discord usernames but are not on the IOTA Discord Server, if you are one of them, please join the server and write to Antonio Nardella to be added to the X-Teams.

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

dimitaracev, MOSDEV82, karlsruhe-node, C3PO, Vinceee, BiXe, Mahmuda Akter Keya, Cheezy, Lumpenheinrich, iotea3, philipp, Stephan07, Hasib, bcn137, hustler, Knacki92, Nocraze, Nft_iota, EasonC13, powderfinger, Birdy, IvanChen, TomSeestern, Nibiryus, Foofork, Pesco, Spacecat, Michel Machado, Merk92, Jonas, Warlosst, mpochert2, Simon H.

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 Teams, explore the IOTA Experience Initiatives, join the IOTA Discord and then apply through this form.

Follow the IOTA Experience teams and receive updates on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/IOTAXTeams. 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!