IOTA 2.0 DevNet (Nectar) - The Era of IOTA’s Decentralization Starts Here

TL;DR:
Today we launch the IOTA 2.0 DevNet, the first fully decentralized IOTA network without the need of a Coordinator, together with our new Digital Assets framework. We invite everyone (and every machine) to join this network, to learn, and to experience the future of IOTA today. Check the fancy new website, the Tangle explorer, and the developer documentation.

In 2015, the IOTA project laid out a vision for a scalable, feeless, decentralized distributed ledger protocol which became known as The Tangle.

Copying a PoW or PoS-based blockchain and improving upon it would have been easy. Some blockchain iterations have provided significant improvements to the first protocol proposed by Bitcoin in 2008. Yet still, after more than a decade of innovation, all of these networks suffer from the same fundamental drawbacks introduced by a blockchain architecture: either they are not truly decentralised, not scalable, have inefficient fee structures, waste electricity, or are simply not secure enough (or even multiple of these issues combined).

From 2015 onwards many believed that it was impossible to overcome these fundamental drawbacks and introduce a completely new distributed ledger architecture. “I’ll believe it when I see it” was a popular and often repeated mantra by early critics of IOTA’s ambitious plans. It is clear why that was the case: there was no tangible proof for the feasibility of developing a DLT based on something other than the common blockchain architecture, or a network that could be deemed secure without transaction fees and economic subsidies (in the form of inflation) to incentivize validators. IOTA wanted to prove that both were achievable.

By 2019, the IOTA research team and academic partners outlined the theoretical foundation of a feeless, fully decentralized and secure IOTA protocol - what became known as IOTA 2.0. The solution was subsequently defined and peer reviewed in more than a dozen academic papers, published through reputable journals and presented at prestigious conferences.

We designed the IOTA 2.0 protocol to be an open, equitable and fair distributed ledger network, where every network participant is governed by the same rules and algorithms and has the exact same rights. Built on a leaderless consensus protocol, every node directly contributes to the security and consensus of the network by validating transactions. With low-resource requirements suitable for the Internet of Things our vision was that IOTA 2.0, once deployed in production, would become one of the largest and most decentralized distributed ledger networks possible.

After years of hard work to implement the theoretical foundations into code by our team and academic partners, and nearly a year of extensive testing, validation and iterative development together with our community, we are finally ready for everyone to “see it and believe it”. We are proud to announce today the launch of the IOTA 2.0 Development Network (DevNet): the first fully decentralized, scalable and feeless IOTA network, as was envisioned at the inception of the project in 2015.

No fees.
No blocks.
No chain.
No miners.
No wasted energy.
No censorship.
No centralization.
No permissions.

Total freedom!

The IOTA 2.0 DevNet is open for any one and any machine to participate in, to transact without any fees, to build on - and to experience the future of IOTA today. We have developed a number of ways in which you can engage with the network:

Visit the IOTA 2.0 website and learn more
See the Iota 2.0 DevNet in action with our visualizer
Understand how it all works with our specifications
Run your own IOTA 2.0 devnet node!

The IOTA 2.0 DevNet is the next evolution on our path to becoming a global standard, building on the work of the successful Chrysalis upgrade in April 2021. With the IOTA 2.0 DevNet, our partners and community are invited to start innovating with an entirely new playground, and a myriad of tools, features, use cases and opportunities. The IOTA 2.0 DevNet not only introduces full decentralization, but it is also the first time that our Digital Assets framework is ready for the community to start experimenting with. Today marks the first day our ecosystem can start building dApps and new business models before the inevitable future of IOTA 2.0 launching on our mainnet (known as “Coordicide”).

It is important to keep in mind that IOTA 2.0 will be rapidly innovated upon by the IOTA Foundation, community contributors and academic partners. The network will be continuously improved, upgraded and tested, and you can expect occasional interruptions and bugs. This is the approach we must take to accelerate progress and technological evolution. Let’s move fast and break things together!

The IOTA 2.0 DevNet introduces a wide range of new features and functionalities, including:

Permissionless and decentralized voting with FPC
Fast finality using Mana based approval weight
Low energy Sybil protection system using Mana
Fair Access managed by the novel and leaderless IOTA Congestion Control Algorithm
Efficient algorithms using a parallel reality ledger state
Secure Autopeering system guaranteeing safe network connections
Our new Digital Assets framework for creating tokenized assets and NFTs
Anchoring of IOTA smart contract chains

So what comes next? GoShimmer was initially developed as a research prototype. With all the components implemented in code, we can now evaluate each module’s performance in greater detail, allowing us to improve their design and finalize important parameters. This will assist our research team in finishing the standardized IOTA 2.0 protocol, and, in conjunction with our engineering team, implementing that protocol in Rust and Go in the Bee and Hornet nodes respectively.

Together with our research partners, we will use the IOTA 2.0 DevNet to:

Test and vet the protocol by experimenting and collecting data and further optimize the entire IOTA 2.0 solution
Study how all parameters should be defined
Improve the software implementations in preparation for support in Bee and Hornet nodes
Identify and remove any potential performance bottlenecks
Simplify the protocol by eliminating any elements deemed unnecessary

Through the iterative development on the IOTA 2.0 DevNet, we will eventually introduce incentives to the network. After assessing various options for the incentivized testnet, our team is confident that we have devised a suitable approach to openly battle-test the IOTA 2.0 solution and accelerate Coordicide on mainnet and the upgrade to IOTA 2.0. Most importantly, we believe this to be a long-term solution that will contribute to the sustained growth and acceleration of IOTA and its ecosystem - but that is a story for another day. Today we celebrate the launch of the IOTA 2.0 DevNet and officially mark the beginning of the march towards IOTA’s full decentralization.

Do you have questions or comments? Join our the #IOTAv2DevNet channel on Discord to chat directly with our team!

Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook