Introducing Hornet — A Lightweight IOTA Node

The IOTA Foundation understands the need to fundamentally reshape the requirements of our software ecosystem to attend to the demand for the adoption of our technology. Partners and established companies from different industries expect a mature ecosystem of tools to use our technology and build on the Tangle, IOTA’s underlying data structure.

Along with our ongoing work on different pieces of our technology stack, like client libraries and MAM, we have always invested in ensuring participation in the Tangle through node software is as seamless as possible. The reference implementation, IRI, has undergone many changes and improvements over the last year with the goal to make participation in the Tangle and the set up of private networks much better experiences.

We are also working on our highly performant node offering written in Rust. Called Bee, the first version of this node software will be out next year.

IOTA counts on a thriving ecosystem of developers contributing to tools and applications for anyone interested in innovating with our technology. The IOTA Foundation supports this ecosystem through the Ecosystem Development Fund.

To evolve and diversify our node software offering, the IOTA Foundation has been supporting the development of a node implementation written in Go. This implementation — called Hornet — is now available as a beta version here. This is a more lightweight take on our Java node implementation (IRI). The functionality is on par with the latest version of IRI, with the exception of local snapshots, which will be added soon.

The Hornet team is a combined team consisting of members of our community, and one developer from the foundation:

Maximilian Hase (muXxer#1289).
Alexander Sporn (alexsporn#6593).
Sebastian Fuchs (IoTMOD#0279).
Luca Moser — IOTA Foundation (Luca Moser [IF]#4960).

The Hornet team did an amazing job building the node software. We are very happy to have Hornet as an addition to our existing ecosystem, and we look forward to seeing how Hornet evolves in the upcoming months and years!

You can read more about Hornet in this blog post.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord. You can follow the development of Hornet on the #hornet discussion channel.