Dev Status Update - June 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 has been over a month since we released Chrysalis on the mainnet. You can read all about the release here. So far, over 45% of all tokens have been migrated to the new network!

The engineering department is now focused on shifting its efforts to Coordicide, further developing our Smart contract capabilities, and Ledger support in the Firefly wallet.

Nectar

Just last week, we launched the IOTA 2.0 DevNet, the first fully decentralized IOTA network without the need of a Coordinator, together with our new Digital Assets framework. Check the fancy 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 a 0.1.2 version of Bee. For those interested, see the instructions on how you can run your Bee node. 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.

Hornet

The team has mainly been focusing on adding autopeering functionality to Hornet as well as fixing outstanding issues. Autopeering will be part of the next Hornet release.

Smart contracts

Since the last release of the IOTA Smart Contract protocol the team has been working hard on improving the software and making sure ISCP is compatible with the IOTA 2.0 (Nectar) test network. New output types were implemented for this and the Wasp node software was refactored to accomodate all changes. A new chain consensus mechanism has been implemented, and there is good progress on integrating EVM support as well for full Solidity smart contract support. With the next release fully programmable, smart contracts on the IOTA 2.0 testnet will become a reality.

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

Stronghold

The communication crate is currently receiving a final revision to make its interface actor-model agnostic, and we are adding more tests, specifically to the firewall feature. In order to verify the lack of unexpected behaviour, we are building a fuzzer that uses the communications interface between two clients. Finally, we are building a Tauri Demo app so that we can validate not only the methods of remote signing, but also as a testbed for binary instrumentation that will prove that our memory protection works as expected.

Tutorial videos are also being prepared by Tensor Programming so that the common use cases of Stronghold can be understood and implemented.

Wallet

With very few bugs since Firefly was released to production, the wallet team is focussing their efforts on adding support for Ledger Nano. The Create New Wallet and Import Existing Wallet flows have been implemented, and sending and receiving funds is working well. We are currently working on the Chrysalis Migration for Ledger and all of the different flows there, including Bundle Mining. We are also polishing some UX details to ensure the user experience is more seamless than the original Trinity Ledger integration. The team has also been working with the libraries team on some performance improvements for wallet.rs, including making different functions non-blocking and speeding up sync times.

It has gradually become clear that the Firefly team is simply not yet big enough to support our ambitious plans, and so we are in the process of expanding the team. We are hiring 3-4 new team members so that we can build Firefly Mobile and upcoming features like NFTs and contacts in a quicker timeframe.

IOTA Identity

After the beta release, the team is planning the next steps and refactoring some of the codebase. We are researching and designing a good architecture for future bindings to other languages, like C and Python, and supporting platforms ranging from common operating systems to the web and ESP32s. We also welcomed new team member Philipp Gackstatter, and are seeing a good growth in the Identity interest in the community. This week, we had a record amount of weekly NPM downloads and participants in the Identity X-team weekly call.

Chronicle

The team has been busy making fixes to the Chrysalis version of Chronicle. The focus is now going to shift to additional functionality, mainly selective transaction storage.

IOTA Experience Team

This month, the X-Teams members are pushing and contributing to different goals.

A group of X-Team members which includes adamski, Phylo, Jeroen van den Hout and Dr. Electron are working very closely with the UI/UX team and the technical writers at the IOTA Foundation to publish a wiki that will provide a first port of call for info about IOTA and the community, while also supporting the epic work of the ecosystem by guiding visitors to the more in depth docs, repos, blogs, further info, and everything else IOTA.
Get in touch if you would like to contribute!

This is a preview and not a final design

Simplify X-Team member Phylo has published a guide in two parts to set up a HORNET node that is now available here thanks to the feedback and support of the team:

Phylo also heavily contributed to the channel's descriptions of the IOTA Discord!

Learn about how to contribute to this initiative here.

On June 1, the Bee team invited the Bee X-Team members to talk about the Packable feature and held a Rust live coding session!

If you are a Rust developer, make sure to join the Bee X-Team to share your experience or gain new ones from the team that is working on the rustlang framework for building IOTA nodes, clients, and applications in Rust.

Bee X-Team member Dr. Electron published his first PR to the Bee repository on GitHub for Coordicide! This is a prime example of how everyone can contribute to the future of the IOTA protocol.

One of our latest IOTA Libraries X-Team members, SourCL | Stefan, developed and published a PHP library to interact with the IOTA REST API.

The IOTA 2.0 DevNet launch has been a great success. In this regards we want to thank the fundamental contributions of the GoShimmer X-Team members:

Luca, SteveK, nikoulai, Phylo, Jack Kerouac,Dave [EF], Myhrmans, Brian Sztamfater, Xee Vee, Stefano Della Valle, emanuelneher, luka, Chris G., Dr. Electron, Maik Piel, Carpincho Dem, MaKla, Rafael Brochado, anistark, H., ReneW, Werner, poster, StromFLIX, Khal Drogo, javitech, Callinectes and eot

This month, we welcome the latest members to the IOTA X-Teams: dmade, davinki, chrispilot, dan c, SourCL | Stefan, future_yacht_owner, poster, Sefear, Werner, CrashOverride, Brennan, MzK91/VoteForDAO and UnCoined#9234.

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.

It is now possible to follow the IOTA Experience teams 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!