The IOTA Foundation announced the launch of the Pollen testnet as a further step towards the consolidation of IOTA 2.0, a path that will lead the Internet of Things (IoT) network towards true decentralization and scalability.
The developer team of the IOTA Foundation has been carrying out arduous research and analysis for several years with the aim of building a distributed ledger (DLT) truly decentralized, scalable and cost-free, that delivers on the initial promises made by the Foundation. First, the testnet Pollen will allow the team to develop a research bank, while the interested community and other participants will be able to test the veracity of the concepts offered by the new update. IOTA 2.0.
Likewise, the Foundation also noted that Pollen is the first of 3 phases that contemplate the update of IOTA to IOTA 2.0, in addition to the fact that it presents a significant improvement of the source code compared to the previously released version, the Alphanet v0.1.3In this sense, the new testnet brings together a series of complete features for the launch of IOTA 2.0, becoming a truly functional network, where the existence of a coordinator (coordinator) becomes unnecessary.
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Features of the new test network
As specified in the IOTA post, the testnet integrates a number of updates that will allow developers and users to test new features for the network. For example, the integration of a new consensus protocol that will eliminate the need for coordinators in the IOTA network in the future. The team also reports that users of the network will be able to make or receive value transactions through faucet automated or Wallets, in addition to sending or receiving Tokens or use IOTA tokens to represent other types of real-world assets, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, among others.
On the other hand, thanks to the implementation of grafana, node operators will have the ability to monitor and evaluate various metrics through the software's dashboard. Likewise, the team notes that the creation of decentralized applications (dApps) within the Pollen network will be free of charge, thanks to a new capability including the testnet for IOTA ecosystems.
Pollen FPC Consensus Protocol
The current IOTA system integrates the figure of a coordinator node, which is managed by the IOTA Foundation and is responsible for preventing attacks and errors within the network by validating confirmed transactions. Through this coordinator figure, the nodes interconnected to the IOTA network are only allowed to validate transactions previously issued by the coordinator node; those that are not, must be rejected.
So, in 2019 IOTA incorporated a simulator based on the Fast Probabilistic Consensus Protocol (Fast Probabilistic Consensus), also known as protocol FPC-BI for its acronym in English, which was developed at Cornell University, United States, by the Dr. William Buchanan and the Dr. Sergei Popov. The introduction of this consensus protocol was done in order to test how nodes behave under certain types of conditions. During the tests with the simulator, the nodes had a partial view and a complete view of the network in stages, in addition to other conditions such as randomness and adversarial strategies, so that the developers could evaluate their behavior in the different imposed scenarios.
Now, the Pollen testnet implements this consensus protocol to ensure a new form of consensus that will allow it to function without the need for a coordinator in the future. Although IOTA developers claim that the removal of the coordinator will occur when the network is mature, there is no doubt that this is a big step towards consolidating the network.
IOTA 2.0 Objectives
First of all, it should be mentioned that IOTA is a decentralized and open-source DLT network focused on the Internet of Things (IoT), which uses a ledger called Tangle Ledger, which allows the management of anything that is connected to the Internet, including the execution of transactions simultaneously, scalably and at practically no cost.
Now, with IOTA 2.0, the coordinator figure is being eliminated to give the network a truly decentralized character, remembering that the coordinator node is managed by the IOTA Foundation and this, in turn, controls the transactions that will be validated by the rest of the nodes; therefore, it is centralized. Thus, the team hopes to implement, through Pollen, the central development ideas that will lead the IOTA network towards the true path of decentralization, for a completely secure, decentralized and scalable network.
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