Dev Status Update – September 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. For monthly research updates, click here.

Chrysalis

It’s been a couple months since the successful release of Chrysalis on the mainnet. You can read all about the release here. So far, over 67% of all tokens have been migrated to the new network.

In August, we added Ledger Nano support to Firefly. You can read all about the update here. Or you can check out the video we have produced showcasing how easy it is to migrate your IOTA tokens on a Ledger Nano.

A large focus of the engineering team currently revolves around Smart contracts and future protocol upgrades to support our smart contract capabilities.

IOTA 2.0 Devnet

Following the successful release of the IOTA 2.0 DevNet in early June, the team has been focusing on changes to consensus and optimizations. For the latest on the status of IOTA 2.0, please read the post we released earlier this week. The GoShimmer team has just released a new version, which mainly contains refactor and dependency updates. The release does not focus on the OTV consensus changes. We are now also providing daily database exports so that community members can more easily spin up new nodes.

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 recently released two versions of the node, 0.2.0 and 0.2.1, introducing pruning, fixing bugs and improving performances. We recommend updating to the latest version. The team has also been working on instrumentation to better debug and improve performances.

The work on coordicide continues with a completely new plugin system, a revamped storage implementation, new message and payload layouts and their validation rules, the use of a common actor framework between the Bee node and the Chronicle node, a draft of the message flow, as well as a network layer compatible with GoShimmer.

Hornet

Earlier this month, the team released the 1.0.5 version of Hornet. Since then, the team has been largely working on specifications for the next protocol upgrades coming to IOTA.

Smart contracts

This month the IOTA Smart Contract team continued the work on the Beta version of ISCP which will be released on the IOTA 2.0 Devnet once the last documentation has been added and tweaks have been merged. A new schema tool has been merged into the codebase which allows you to take away all the heavy lifting while developing smart contracts so you can focus on what matters, the implementation itself. The experimental EVM support is being improved and tested as well while in the meantime preparations are already taking place on the deliverables after the Beta release. This includes support for the new Native assets standard that is currently being specified and extended EVM support allowing communication between Layer 1 IOTA and ISCP Chains. We’re also laying a final hand on a public testnet for ISCP to make the barrier to entry for experimenting with the ISCP Beta lower. The documentation for ISCP has been rewritten as well and once we wrap up the last topics we’ll merge this into the Wiki for easy reference. We can’t wait for you to try it out once the Beta has been released.

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

Stronghold

We are on the ongoing journey towards the version 1.0 of Stronghold. Current features include full and partial synchronization for local strongholds first, later for remote strongholds. In this regard, we are also aiming towards remote execution of procedures. The composable cryptographic procedural API reaches its final stages and we are currently working on integrating basic cryptographic building blocks.

Wallet

The Firefly team recently moved their development discussions public and you can follow the progress in the #firefly-dev channel on Discord. We are also planning to move development of Firefly Mobile public at some point as well.

The team is focused on a mixture of things at the moment. Firefly Mobile is progressing nicely and the user interface is coming together. The Android bindings are under development, while iOS are under research and likely to take several more weeks. Once the bindings on each platform are ready, we can begin to hook up the UI to the underlying logic and to the wallet.rs library on that respective platform. Meanwhile the team has been doing some housekeeping, cleaning up issues and adding wiki articles to help promote community development. UX ideation for some of the future features of Firefly is ongoing in parallel.

IOTA Identity

The IOTA Identity team continues to grow with two additional Rust developers: Henrique Nogara and Oliver Anderson, completing the team for now. With the many recent joiners in the team, and our next goal being the IOTA Identity 1.0 Release Candidate, we have been doing a lot of research and specification writing on different topics to provide the best API we could design. We are expecting to make using IOTA Identity even easier in the next few updates and are continuing our efforts to spec out DID Communications for the Identity Actor.

This month we have also released the first version of the Identity Resolver. This tool has become part of the IOTA Explorer and provides developers and interested community members with the ability to explore the state and history of digital identities. This is particularly helpful when you are developing an application with IOTA Identity as you can view the history of your created identities with a single click of a button.

Chronicle

The team has been busy making fixes to the Chrysalis version of Chronicle and rewriting the backstage part of the permanode. This work has happened together with the Bee team and the projects now share the actor model implementation. We are now mainly 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

This month, we welcome the latest members to the IOTA X-Teams: Sabo/LendexeFinance and Gman214

X-Team member Stefan Braun from IOTA.php announced that the 100% community driven IOTA PHP library, available here, has integrated IOTA Identity in the new released 0.4.0 alpha version. Support the project by following IOTA.php on Twitter and adding a star to the repository on GitHub!

Permanode X-Team member NO8ODY has released the Version 0.8.6 of his SWARM Node management software. With this new release The update now allows the simultaneous installation of Hornet, Bee and GoShimmer Nodes on one system.

Find out how easy it is to set up and manage IOTA Nodes on his website.

Support the project by following Tanglebay on Twitter and adding a star to the repository on GitHub!

We are happy to see another IOTA community project going live. X-Team members Merul, adamski and rbrtbrnschn have lifted the curtains for their IOTA UP project

UP is a project sharing platform that enables creators to connect with the community. Offering a one-stop shop to share updates and connect with a global audience, to gain support and exposure for groundbreaking innovation and design.

Make sure to visit the IOTA UP and learn more about this great community initiative. Sign in and add your project to IOTA UP!

Simplify X-Team member Linus published 2 posts on Reddit and Medium about IOTA which are totally worth a read:
Reddit:

Medium:

The X-Team and community driven IOTA Wiki is growing!

X-Team members Dr. Muon, adamski, Critical and Jeroen van den Hout have continued to work on the wiki and refined styling, content and user experience a lot.
The wiki will be a one-stop shop for IOTA information. Let's BUIDL it together!

Developers are invited to enhance the Community Wiki initiative by looking over the code in the repository. Jeroen van den Hout has created 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, Your contribution would be really appreciated. The implemented in-page editor, which makes it easy to contribute to the Wiki content without being a GitHub expert, has helped a lot of community members to contribute already. Follow their example! The only thing you need to be able to use it is a GitHub account.

Every IOTA community member is encouraged to extend the content with their contributions.

Join the discussion in the #community-wiki channel on the IOTA Discord

The members of the X-Team Smart contracts are getting ready to support the IOTA Smart contracts Team on the journey towards the anticipated Beta release of ISCP. The IOTA Foundation Smart contracts Team has invited the X-Team members already for contribution and support and the members are getting active on that topic.

As the community wants to prepare for the next steps in IOTAs Smart contracts development, the X-Team Smart contracts initiative has found a new champion that will ensure that the X-Team members can have a weekly meetup and start on exchanging ideas and strengthen their skills in running Smart contracts on IOTA. We welcome Gman214 as new X-Team champion and thank him for taking on this important role.

If you want to get your hands dirty with ISCP and contribute to the beta launch, join the X-Teams.

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.

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.