Stories by Jakub Cech on Medium

Chrysalis update — December 4

Jakub Cech — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 15:23:46 GMT

Chrysalis update — December 4

Published weekly as a summary of Chrysalis phase 2 updates. Please click here if you want to read the full monthly dev status update.

IOTA 1.5

IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) is the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis phase 1 components were deployed to mainnet in August. The engineering team is now working on Chrysalis phase 2.

This week’s updates and status

Bee

This week, the Bee team performed a special live session where they demonstrated running the Bee node on a private Chrysalis testnet, connecting to Hornet nodes and synchronizing.
The team is fixing and updating pieces across network, ledger state, tangle storage, and API implementations.
The new API is close to being fully implemented, with a few bits of the message sending API ongoing. Changes to the API in both Bee and Hornet are still expected throughout the testing phase of Chrysalis.
Moving crates to the main Bee repository is ongoing.

Hornet

The Delta snapshots functionality has been merged.
Added bech32 encoding to the REST API.
Progressing on configuration and set up of the public Chrysalis testnet.

Iota.rs and wallet.rs

Our Rust implementation of standard client library and wallet functionalities

Fixing outstanding issues on the wallet.rs side, for example a timeout when sending tokens with neon bindings.
Wallet.rs is undergoing internal testing.
Neon bindings for iota.rs have been merged.
Adjusting the libs to breaking changes in node API.

Crypto.rs and Stronghold

Crypto.rs is a crate for all cryptographic algorithms used by many of the projects at IF. Stronghold is a secure software implementation for safe digital secrets isolation.

bip32 path and slip10 derivation are being vetted within stronghold, will promote to crypto.rs soon.
Audit for crypto.rs is outstanding.
The top-level client interface in Stronghold is finished and is now being adapted to the needs of wallet.rs
Crypto.rs assets are integrated where available.
Performance gains in Stronghold snapshotting have been identified.
The aim is to finish everything required for the wallet integration by the end of this week.

Firefly

Chrysalis phase 2 will come with a new wallet implementation that replaces Trinity.

We have published a post to start educating people and making them aware of our upcoming next-generation wallet, Firefly, and its future.
Work continues on hooking all the components and dependencies together, fixing issues as they are found in underlying libraries, and more.
The current plan is to launch the first rounds of alpha testing in the upcoming weeks, with an audit starting in early January.

Testnet

We are now in a phase of testing Chrysalis functionality on a private testnet. We are working on bringing all the necessary bits and pieces for making the testnet public together. This includes:

The CLI wallet — done.
New faucet — close to being done, will be deployed soon,
Complete infrastructure, which we have been working on with the Hornet team.
Node software stabilized — breaking changes will still be part of the testnet.
Wallet.rs with JS bindings — done
Iota.rs with JS bindings — done

Once all the pieces have come together, we will publish them as the first version of our public Chrysalis testnet, stay tuned!

Audits

A large part of the Chrysalis phase 2 effort is auditing the new functionality. We have booked the relevant availability with multiple external auditing firms for the upcoming weeks to start auditing the different components as soon as possible.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!

Chrysalis update — November 27

Jakub Cech — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 12:56:41 GMT

Chrysalis Weekly Status Update — November 27

Published weekly as a summary of Chrysalis phase 2 updates. Please click here if you want to ready the full monthly dev status update.

IOTA 1.5

IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) is the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis phase 1 components were deployed to mainnet in August. The engineering team is now working on Chrysalis phase 2.

This week’s updates and status

Bee

Last week, the Bee team successfully connected a Bee node to Hornet nodes on the Chrysalis testnet. This allowed the team to successfully test synchronization between the nodes.
The team is updating the network protocol, with tweaks on the ledger and snapshot implementation.
An endpoint for sending messages remains to be implemented from the new API.
Moving crates to the main Bee repository.
The upcoming focus will be largely on documentation, testing, and auditing the necessary crates.

Hornet

Progressing on refactoring gossip, tangle, and snapshot plug-ins.
Reset the internal Chrysalis testnet on the addition of network IDs to the message layout.
MQTT websocket implementation added.
Added delta snapshot import and export functionality.

Iota.rs and wallet.rs

Our Rust implementation of standard client library and wallet functionalities.

Reattachment, promotion and retry logic has been merged.
Node synchronization process is now working.
The first integration with Hornet’s MQTT interface has been merged.
Python bindings for iota.rs are well in progress. Sending messages and checking balance works, other APIs in progress.
There will be two documented ways to handle seeds in the library, one using Stronghold, the other using dotenv.
Wallet.rs node.js bindings via Neon have been merged.

Crypto.rs and Stronghold

Crypto.rs is a crate for all cryptographic algorithms used by many of the projects at IF. Stronghold is a secure software implementation for safe digital secrets isolation.

Introduction of changelog, release management and polyglot artifact publishing workflow via covector.
Cross-platform introduction of secure zone.
Revised client, top level actor, and libp2p.
Participation in cross-project bindings working-group.
Collaboration with riker.rs project (the Actor Model used by Stronghold).
Top-level library for Stronghold is in progress, this will be used as an entry point to Stronghold for all consuming applications (and bindings).
Main focus is to get the wallet and its integration with the libraries in working order.

Firefly

Chrysalis phase 2 will come with a new wallet implementation, named Firefly, that replaces Trinity.

Work continues on hooking up wallet.rs to the wallet application.
The goal of this week is to complete the integration of the UI. This will allow us to have the first wallet alpha available for the community in the upcoming weeks.
Work on the new faucet, which will be powered by wallet.rs using Neon bindings is in progress. Front-end has been designed, integration will follow.

Testnet

We are now in a phase of testing Chrysalis functionality on a private testnet. We are working on bringing all the necessary bits and pieces for making the testnet public together. This includes

the CLI wallet — close to being finished,
new faucet,
complete infrastructure, which we are now reworking, set-up,
node software stabilized — breaking changes will still be part of the testnet,
wallet.rs with JS bindings,
iota.rs with JS bindings.

The current aim is to have the necessary tooling ready by the end of next week.

Audits

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!

Chrysalis update — November 19

Jakub Cech — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 16:15:13 GMT

Chrysalis Weekly Status Update — November 19th

Published weekly as a summary of Chrysalis phase 2 updates. Please click here if you want to ready the full monthly dev status update.

IOTA 1.5

IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) is the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis phase 1 components were deployed to mainnet in August. The engineering team is now working on Chrysalis phase 2.

This week’s updates and status

Bee

The Bee team has successfully connected a Bee node to Hornet nodes on the Chrysalis testnet.
The rest of the new API endpoints are being finalized this week.
Will now begin moving crates to the main Bee repository.
Upcoming focus will be largely on documentation and auditing the necessary crates.

Hornet

The Hornet team has been making fixes in the networking stack.
Refactoring of gossip, tangle and snapshot plugins.
Adding network ids to the message layout.
Adding MQTT to the node implementation.
Changed the build system to make use of Go 1.15.5.

Iota.rs and wallet.rs

Our Rust implementation of standard client library and wallet functionalities

Finished reviewing the Rust library, iota.rs according to the specifications.
Next up, we will be working on reattachments, promotion and retry logic.
Python bindings for the iota.rs library will follow.
Added the first integration with Hornet’s MQTT interface.
Investigating how we can use MQTT for state update events in the wallet.rs library.

Crypto.rs and Stronghold

Crypto.rs is a crate for all cryptographic algorithms used by many of the projects at IF. Stronghold is a secure software implementation for safe digital secrets isolation.

We are aiming to publish the library to crates.io this week.
Merged a PR for ed25519 (using ed25519-zebra), blake2b and curl_p.
Work started on bindings (Neon for js), CI is being set up.
This will be one of the most important bits to audit for Chrysalis phase 2. An audit of this and other libraries is being scheduled.
The Stronghold library is being refactored.
Top-level library for Stronghold is in progress, this will be used as an entry point to Stronghold for all-consuming applications (and bindings).

Wallet

Chrysalis phase 2 will come with a new wallet implementation that replaces Trinity.

Work continues on hooking up wallet.rs to the wallet application.
We would like to have a first wallet alpha available for the community in the upcoming weeks.
The new Ledger Nano application, replacing WOTS with Ed25519 is in progress.
Finalizing the wallet UI after several iterations.
Work on a CLI wallet and faucet will commence shortly, this will help us with testing the wallet and libraries on the testnet.

Identity

Thoralf#3558 successfully ran IOTA Identity alpha on the Chrysalis testnet.

Testnet

We are now in a phase of testing Chrysalis functionality on a private testnet. Once we have concluded the initial tests of node software and client library implementations, and we have all the supporting software ready, we will make the testnet public.

Audits

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!

Dev Status Update — November, 2020

Jakub Cech — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 13:56:12 GMT

Dev Status Update — November, 2020

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.

The research department is also releasing a monthly update that you might want to read.

IOTA 1.5

IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) is the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis phase 1 components were deployed to mainnet in August. The engineering team is now working on Chrysalis phase 2.

Winternitz one time signature scheme support in Chrysalis phase 2

The initial IOTA protocol was designed with certain assumptions in mind. One of those assumptions was that we would make it resilient to quantum computing. To do so, we introduced the Winternitz one-time signature scheme (W-OTS). However, as time progressed, we realized that our dependency on this novel signature scheme brought drawbacks that hindered our technological progress in other areas. One time signatures present significant usability hurdles for users. That is why, earlier this year, we announced that we would add a more standard signature scheme to the protocol with ed25519. As we move towards Chrysalis phase 2, we have decided to take this one step further and start preparing for the complete removal of W-OTS from the IOTA protocol. We will share more details on what the transition will entail in an upcoming, separate post.

The removal of W-OTS will allow for a much more lightweight IOTA protocol, with smaller transactions, greater usability, and faster progress when developing new technology.

Nonetheless, we still consider post-quantum cryptography a critical topic for the long-term future of the project and are already working with leading post-quantum cryptographers to align with the NIST standards that arrive in 2021.

Implementing Chrysalis phase 2

We are making great progress towards implementing Chrysalis phase 2 in the IOTA protocol. We already have a testnet with working Hornet and Bee node implementations, with which we are finalizing the new node API and testing the new client libraries.

In the upcoming weeks, we plan on:

Testing the first version of our new wallet software on the network.
Making the testnet public. Our partners and exchanges will be welcome to test the new client libraries and plan for the transition of their integrations, while the public will be welcome to join the testnet as we test it more thoroughly in later stages.

With that in mind, we plan on having all the important integrations finalized (or close to finalized) in December. This will allow us to kick off audits and comprehensive rounds of final testing. We expect this audit and testing phase to take several weeks, meaning the new Chrysalis mainnet will launch early in the new year. Moving forward, we will release more frequent, weekly updates as we progress, so stay tuned!

Bear in mind we have also added the removal of W-OTS into the scope of Chrysalis phase 2. This saves us a later transition between Chrysalis phase 2 and Coordicide, or with Coordicide. We think it makes most sense to remove W-OTS now with Chrysalis phase 2 rather than waiting.

Pollen

We will be releasing a new version, 0.3.1, of the Pollen network this week. This update will include different fixes, changes in dependencies, refactor of the message structure and more. You can read about the update in a post coming out tomorrow.

The team is working on the next large milestone, Nectar. Specifically, we will be focusing on the mana module.

You can read more about Pollen, Nectar, and Honey, concepts we introduced to talk about the milestones on the path to Coordicide, in this post.

You can follow the project on its GitHub repository. If you want to get involved, check out our updated contributing guidelines.

Bee

The Bee team has finished the transition to a libp2p network and is working on setting up Bee nodes on the Chrysalis phase 2 alphanet that we use for initial Chrysalis phase 2 testing. The nodes are starting to process messages. After some design iterations, the storage layer is done and the mapping of the different types is ongoing. The new Local Snapshot format is implemented and the snapshot generation is yet to be done. Most of the White Flag UTXO ledger logic has been implemented. Most of the new Chrysalis phase 2 APIs have also been implemented.

The Bee team live streams have been moved to Monday. You can find all the live streams here.

You can find all Bee RFCs in their respective GitHub repository.

Hornet

The team has significantly progressed with the implementation of Chrysalis phase 2 changes in the node software. One of the pieces has been the Proof of Work (PoW) for binary messages, which has been submitted to iota.go and delta local snapshots, which are in progress. Changes like the new node API, and local snapshots and solidification are working in the current development build.

The team has also been working on a release candidate of the 0.5.4 of Hornet, which mainly fixes a coordinator start-up race condition.

Smart contracts

We have released the pre-alpha version of IOTA Smart Contracts. You can read all about it in this blog post. We are now working on scoping up the future development of the smart contracts protocol, to Wasp alpha, fully integrated Wasmtime VM and VM sandbox API, all the way to Wasp beta and more. You can find that on our roadmap.

Stronghold

Several improvements to the Stronghold engine have been undertaken during the recent refactoring, but most notably we are introducing a restricted runtime with memory-allocator that has been formally proven with COQ . We are currently building a proper top-level client library using Riker that will serve as the only entry point to Stronghold for all consuming applications (and bindings). The client will delegate incoming message requests to internal actors. Finally, we are finishing off the libp2p engine-actor to enable communication between Strongholds.

During the refactoring, we decided that it would be wise to move all cryptographic primitives outside of Stronghold, and thus the external crate known as crypto.rs was born. This crate will serve as the single source of acceptable and compliant cryptographic algorithms for all Rust projects at the IOTA Foundation — and will use feature flags so that consuming libraries and applications will be able to pick and choose what cryptography they will need. This library will then be audited by an external security consultancy. Ultimately, this will mean not only that we are using the same cryptography across product lines, but the tricky parts of choosing, configuring and implementing will only have to be done once.

Wallet

The final few details of the wallet design are coming together, with the settings and onboarding illustrations still being worked on. The reworked dashboard is more or less complete, paving the way for the front end team to build out the dashboard UI. The wallet dashboard has been designed, thrown out, and reworked several times, and the version we have arrived finds a great balance between customizability and simplicity. This will provide a foundation from which to expand with additional features further down the road.

With the launch of the internal Chrysalis testnet, we have been able to begin testing wallet.rs against a Chrysalis Hornet node. wallet.rs has been built in isolation while we were waiting for the testnet, and unsurprisingly, hooking it up to a Chrysalis node has illuminated a number of bugs. We have been working through these and they are for the most part fixed. Now we await the Stronghold refactor before we can consider the library to be stable.

Work continues on hooking up wallet.rs to the wallet application. The vast majority of wallet functionality is provided by stronghold.rs and wallet.rs, so this task will form the bulk of the remaining work. Things are moving along and we are really looking forward to a first wallet alpha within the community. In parallel, pmaxuw AKA MicroEngineer has been working on the new Ledger Nano application, replacing WOTS with Ed25519.

IOTA Identity

We are releasing the first alpha version of DID later today. You will be able to read more information on the release on our blog.

IOTA Streams

We have recently released the last alpha version of IOTA Streams. You can read all about it and the next plans in this blog post.

Chronicle

The Chronicle team is now working on an RFC for the selective permanode functionality. The team, together with other members has also worked on the infrastructure for our new explorer. The explorer is wired to a cluster of permanodes.

IOTA Experience Team

The latest blog post regarding the X-Teams talks about how our efforts towards building bridges between the IOTA Experience Teams and the Tangle EE working groups, where IOTA community members can contribute to the IOTA vision alongside industry partners.

A big thank you to the IOTA X-Team members that supported the launch of the new Tangle Explorer by providing valuable feedback and user experience suggestions.

On November 4th the IOTA community kicked off the first 100% community-driven IOTA Experience Team, the Identity X-Team.

The IOTA Identity Initiative is a collaborative effort to help people in the IOTA Community by introducing consistent workflows around IOTA Identity with content, and open source contributions.

IOTA Identity is an implementation of decentralized digital identity also known as Self Sovereign Identity (SSI). It implements standards such as DID and Verifiable Credentials from W3C and other related (proposed) standards.

We welcome Carpincho Dem#0315, herrkpunkt#3501, Thoralf#3558, Stefano Della Valle#1445, Martin N#8948, Oostech#6884, Marek Tichy#7429, Tensor#2912, 31k3#8053, @anistark#4015, @openwebmarket#1623 and Aconitin#1833 to the Identity X-Team.

Learn more about this initiative and the goals in this GitHub repository.

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. Discover the IOTA Experience Team on GitHub, explore the IOTA Experience Initiatives and then apply through this form.

Roadmap updates

We have made the following updates to our roadmap:

We added Smart contracts alpha as an item to finish early next year.
We moved Chrysalis phase 2 items to finish early next year.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!

Dev Status Update — October, 2020

Jakub Cech — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 13:44:54 GMT

Dev Status Update — October, 2020

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.

The research department is also releasing a monthly update that you might want to read.

IOTA 1.5

IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) is the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis phase 1 components were deployed to mainnet in August. The engineering team is now working on Chrysalis phase 2.

The current plan is to have a publicly available testnet for Chrysalis phase 2 ready as soon as possible. The testnet will allow us to test the node integrations, client libraries, and the new wallet. Partners and anyone integrating on top of the current network will be able to start working with the new APIs and functionality. In November, we will also be auditing the core functionality.

Pollen

We have released a new version of the Pollen network. The latest version of the GoShimmer software, v0.3.0 contains the full integration of the Decentralized Random Number Generator (dRNG) module. You can read up on the update here.

The team is working on the next large milestone, Nectar. The components that will make up the Nectar network are being iteratively released on the testnet to allow us to test individual Coordicide components.

You can read more about Pollen, Nectar, and Honey, concepts we introduced to talk about the milestones on the path to Coordicide, in this post.

You can follow the project on its GitHub repository. If you want to get involved, check out our updated contributing guidelines.

Bee

The Bee team has finished the implementation of some of the important components of the node software. We have switched the runtime to Tokio for better performance and compatibility with the Rust ecosystem. We also switched our channels to flume for better performance. We have added deserialization and serialization of the new message layout for Chrysalis phase 2. The network layer is being migrated to libp2p for the future implementation of autopeering. The node and its interaction with the different workers and storage has been completely refactored for better maintainability.

A large effort that Thibault has started during the regular Friday coding livestream is the removal of bundles and ternary from code. Bee is now working completely without ternary and bundles in the code. You can find the full playlist of our coding livestreams here.

You can find all Bee RFCs in their respective GitHub repository.

Hornet

The team has significantly progressed with the implementation of Chrysalis phase 2 changes in the node software. The biggest missing piece is the adjusted Proof of Work (PoW) for binary messages. Changes like the new node API, and local snapshots and solidification are working in the current development build.

IRI

As noted in this blog post, IRI 1.8.6 was the last release of IRI. The software has been discontinued with the upgrade to Chrysalis phase 1 and you are encouraged to run Hornet nodes instead.

Smart contracts

We have just released the pre-alpha version of IOTA Smart Contracts. You can read all about it in this blog post. We are now working on scoping up the future development of the smart contracts protocol, to Wasp alpha, fully integrated Wasmtime VM and VM sandbox API, all the way to Wasp beta and more. We are also extending the team to be able to ramp up our smart contracts efforts.

Stronghold

The Stronghold team is currently working on the final engine revision and a proper client implementation so that the external security audit in November can be undertaken on schedule. These changes will promote Stronghold to alpha quality software. You can read more about it in the forthcoming blog update.

Wallet

The team has been working to finalize the wallet frontend to provide the designers with a medium through which they can validate the designs, illustrations and UX. The onboarding UI is complete, and there are just some finer details around the dashboard UI to finalize. The process is illuminating because often only when you have a dummy app in front of you can you identify missing functionalities and screens or subpar user experience. Accordingly, the design team is now revisiting some onboarding illustrations and some details around how best to present user accounts.

The backend has been validated and is working across all platforms (iOS, Android, Linux, Windows & Mac). With the UI nearly complete, we will now begin hooking up the wallet frontend to its backend and building the rest of the wallet functionality. This coincides nicely with the progress node API and Hornet teams have made. With the new Chrysalis node API available on internal Hornet nodes, we can begin to test the wallet library in a Chrysalis setting.

Note that the first version of the wallet has been scaled back to core wallet functionality, and with a focus on desktop only initially. This decision was made to ensure nothing is rushed and that the base layer is as solid as possible for expansion — which will pay dividends in the future. Once desktop is complete we will return to the mobile app, and begin adding the future feature set, including things like contacts and, later, colored coins.

IOTA Identity

The DID standard from W3C has almost completely been implemented and the team is preparing an early 0.1 alpha for people interested in experimenting with the DID standard. We are exploring how to provide Javascript bindings as soon as possible. Verifiable Credentials should soon follow for a quick succession of three alpha releases. Keep an eye out for the identity.rs repository for the stream of deliveries that we will see over the next two months.

While these low-level libraries are taking shape, we are designing the higher-level and much easier to use Identity libraries. These will be a lot easier to work with and should support about 90% of the use cases. As discussed last month, integration with Stronghold is also a top priority to deliver out-of-the-box protected digital identities. Thanks to the EDF team consisting of huhn#8105, Thoralf#3558 and Tensor#2912, we remain on track for the release of the IOTA Identity fundamentals before the end of the year.

IOTA Streams

We have just released the last alpha version of IOTA Streams. You can read all about it and the next plans in this blog post.

IOTA Experience Team

This month also brings news about the community involvement in the IOTA Experience Teams.

IOTA Access has been introduced and Bernardo Araujo, our Embedded Software Engineer and System Integrator, is now leading the IOTA Access Experience Team.

This X-Team revolves around IOTA Access and the number of contributors has grown thanks to curiosity and common interest. The X-Team members will have a Q&A session and feedback meeting after exploring the IOTA Access MVP with Bernardo.

Hereby we welcome the new X-Team members lito#3766, Dr.Electron#9370 and hcsatish#2337.

The GoShimmer X-Team supported Angelo Capossele, our Senior Research Scientist, in testing and launching the X-Team dRNG committee that has now become an integral part of the Pollen Testnet with the 0.3.0 release. This committee is providing a verifiable, decentralized randomness beacon that will be used by our consensus mechanism FPC as well as anyone that may need a public source of randomness for GoShimmer.

Their goal in the upcoming months is to mentor and support the IOTA Community in the organization and set up of the official IOTA community driven dRNG committee. We would like to thank the GoShimmer X-Team community members for their help and support throughout the testing phase of the dRNG module.

The Bee X-Team is contributing with very valuable feedback to the IOTA Foundation Bee team.

svenger87#8523, daverl#0001 and Luca#3952 are setting up Bee nodes and reporting their findings.

The IOTA Streams X-Team members Yalamber#9880 and huhn#8105 are contributing independently to IOTA Streams with the goal they proposed: WASM Binding for Node.js and Browsers.

Everyone is invited to the IOTA Experience Teams to pave the road for IOTA to have the best developer experience in the DLT and IoT space. Discover the IOTA Experience Team on GitHub, explore the IOTA Experience Initiatives and then apply through this form.

Roadmap updates

We have made the following updates to our roadmap:

Bee node software has been moved to December. We will be releasing the Bee node software together with Chrysalis phase 2. Due to the scope of the rewrite of Bee for Chrysalis phase 2, a lot of effort would have to be put in components that would be discontinued shortly after the release, such as bundles.
Nectar has been moved to Q1 2021. We expect this is when we will have all the Coordicide components implemented in the GoShimmer node software.
Honey has been moved to the end of Q2 2021.

Disclosure report

This section will mention significant bugs or vulnerabilities that have been fixed in any software managed by the IOTA Foundation.

On August 19, 2020, Hornet v0.5.0 was officially released. This version of Hornet contained a vulnerability that allowed the node software to request transactions with invalid, lower than allowed, Minimum weight magnitude (MWM). This allowed anyone using a customized spammer to send a large number of transactions to the network with a disproportionately low proof of work.

This was consequently fixed with the release of Hornet 0.5.1 on August 27. While the network coordinator and the IF infrastructure was upgraded on the same day as the vulnerability was discovered, August 21, with a build that already contained the fix.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!

Chrysalis (IOTA 1.5) Phase 2 Update And Next Steps

Jakub Cech — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 14:09:21 GMT

IOTA 1.5

The first phase of IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) — the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide — is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis Phase 1 components have been deployed on the IOTA mainnet a few weeks back. Since then, the network has been running with fast confirmation times and sustaining high TPS.

The IOTA Foundation is now actively working on the development of Chrysalis Phase 2 components. You can read more about the release strategy for Chrysalis here. Currently, our plan is to start testing the first version of Chrysalis node software in October or November. Depending on the progress of testing, we would like to release Chrysalis Phase 2 later this year.

Developing Chrysalis Phase 2

Chrysalis Phase 2 will be the biggest network update we have ever performed at the IOTA Foundation. The components of Chrysalis Phase 2 affect every part of the IOTA ecosystem. From the node software, client libraries, products like Streams and Chronicle, to anything that takes any kind of dependency on those, as well as wallet users.

To reiterate, Chrysalis Phase 2 includes:

Ed25519 support — a more commonly used signature scheme and support for reusable addresses.
UTXO — A better fund and state management approach.
Binary transaction layout — validation, IO and other processing working on binary data without the need to have many binary-ternary conversions as in the current node software.
Atomic transactions — Move from the current Bundle construct and use of simpler atomic transactions instead.

The development itself is a significant team effort as the protocol changes every part of the ecosystem. It is important for everyone to be involved in designing the changes. Either directly or by providing feedback, that’s why we also publish the changes as RFCs. Most recently, we added an initial version of the new node API into the proposals.

Node software

The development of Chrysalis Phase 2 changes in the node software is ongoing now. The Bee and Hornet teams are already busy planning for and implementing the changed transaction layout, for example. This work led us to adjust some of the types in the proposed RFCs. However, the changes to the node software side are happening on many fronts. Below is a brief rundown of some of those changes we currently have in the works:

A new message object, this is the object that nodes gossip around the network and contains different payloads
Signed transaction payload
Milestone payload
Indexation payload
Proof of work changes to reflect different message size
An extendable address format for different types of signature schemes based on bech32
A completely new node API
And much more…

Client libraries

All the client libraries need to change significantly for Chrysalis Phase 2. Many of the libraries will be covered with bindings to our core Rust library. Some will remain native, like C or Go.

Client libraries will come with a high-level API that will make integrating and maintaining solutions on top of IOTA simpler than before.

Client libraries will also completely replace Hub, our wallet management solution for exchanges and custodians.

Wallet

The wallet team has been working on the new wallet to replace Trinity for some time now. The new wallet is being rebuilt from the ground up. This includes the UX, all the implementations, and even a new wallet library to support all the underlying functionality through the new Rust library.

The new wallet will be built for both desktop and mobile. With desktop having a higher priority in the development process.

Stronghold will be a strong basis for the new wallet. This will enable a new level of security for wallet users.

IOTA Product Updates

All the other products that we are developing at the Foundation, including IOTA Streams, IOTA Access, or Chronicle, will be adjusted for Chrysalis Phase 2. Some will require more effort than others, some only need their dependencies — specific libraries — to be adjusted. All of this is included in our planning process for Chrysalis.

Testnet

One of the important parts of Chrysalis Phase 2 will be having a testnet with the initial changes live prior to the release. This will allow us to test all the Chrysalis Phase 2 changes, wallet, and products, in addition to testing changes to existing integrations live. The testnet will expose public endpoints for anyone to test the new APIs and integrations.

The testnet will be available after we have a working node software and client library implementation available with the initial set of Chrysalis Phase 2 changes.

Digital assets

The development and support of the digital assets functionality (also previously referred to as colored coins) are enabled by our switch to the UTXO model. With the introduction of Chrysalis Phase 2 and its switch to UTXO, we will mainly focus on reusable addresses, binary transaction layout, introducing a much better developer and wallet experience, and the overall integration of UTXO into the protocol.

Digital assets will be added to the protocol in a subsequent, separate update instead. This will allow us to design, develop, and release the digital assets functionality in a way that allows us to support all the use cases we are envisioning for the tokenized economy. This will allow us to release Chrysalis Phase 2 without being delayed by digital asset capability development.

We are also actively looking at ways to involve external parties to help us develop the tooling and core functionality of the digital assets.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord.

Dev Status Update — September, 2020

Jakub Cech — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 17:05:43 GMT

Dev Status Update — September, 2020

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.

The research department is also releasing a monthly update that you might want to see.

IOTA 1.5

IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) is the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis phase 1 components were deployed to mainnet last month. The engineering team is now working on Chrysalis phase 2.

Pollen

Further improvements of the Pollen network are well underway. Specifically, the latest version of the GoShimmer node software, v0.2.4, brings the integration of the dRNG module, improved tooling and debugging capabilities, and more. You can read up on the update here.

You can read more about Pollen, Nectar, and Honey, concepts we introduced to talk about the milestones on the path to Coordicide in this post.

You can follow the project on its GitHub repository. If you want to get involved, check out our updated contributing guidelines.

Bee

The Bee team is working on finishing up some of the final pieces of the Bee node software, such as the storage layer and local snapshots. The work on auto peering will soon start. The team is also switching the implementation to the Tokio runtime for better performance and compatibility with the Rust ecosystem. Once the last efforts are finished, we will be releasing an alpha version of the Bee software.

Work is also beginning on implementing Chrysalis phase 2 components.

The team has also been doing regular live stream coding sessions every Friday at 5PM CEST. You can find the full playlist here. One of the future sessions will be devoted to releasing the first alpha version of the node software.

You can find all Bee RFCs in their respective GitHub repository.

Hornet

The team has released a breaking 0.5.0 version containing Chrysalis phase 1 changes in August. Since then, the team has been working on fixes and improvements for the node software. Lastly, the team released a 0.5.3 version of Hornet this week.

Initial implementations of some of the Chrysalis phase 2 changes are already in progress. The current goal is to achieve a state in the node software where Chrysalis Phase 2 changes can be tested out in a dedicated test network.

IRI

As noted in this blog post, IRI 1.8.6 was the last release of IRI. The software has been discontinued with the upgrade to Chrysalis phase 1 and you are encouraged to run Hornet nodes instead.

Smart contracts

The Smart contracts team is now mainly focusing on finishing up the prototype release of Wasp node and PoC hard coded smart contracts demo that is slated for end of September.

Stay tuned for more information in the upcoming weeks!

Stronghold

The Continuous Integration workflow at the public github repository is being finalized. This means that the rust crates will be automatically published to https://crates.io — and ‘internal products’ (like the CLI) will be built for the major desktop platforms and published as releases. This is expected to be finalized in week 39 of 2020.

The high-level library for integration with the IOTA Protocol has been built and some of the late protocol changes are on deck for enhancement once they are available in iota.rs. A refactoring of the low-level ‘engine’ is being undertaken to further isolate activities within ‘sub-actors’ to prevent secret leakage. Furthermore, an internal review is underway to identify opportunities to not only zero out memory, but also to limit other simultaneous operations.

On the research fronts, initial work is beginning for the p2p communication system between strongholds (using libp2p-noise). Finally, together with some members of the community, initial tests are being done to identify opportunities for using an adapted Stronghold CLI in concert with a browser extension.

Wallet

The wallet library (wallet.rs) was recently open-sourced. You can now track its progress here. The library is for the most part complete, with some finer details of Stronghold integration, some Chrysalis adjustments, and later testing against a Chrysalis testnet, still to do.

Meanwhile, the wallet front end team has begun implementing the wallet’s user interface. We are currently investigating a new plugin system and an extensible component library. With such a system, developers would be able to build a UI from the component library using json. The plugin system would make third party contributions more straightforward and more easily auditable, as well as generally improving the security of the app (by limiting control over what is allowed and separating contexts).

IOTA Identity

The Identity team has been set up last month consisting out of community members huhn#8105, Thoralf#3558, and Tensor#2912 collaborating through an EDF fund. They work in close collaboration with a few IOTA Foundation developers. In the short time span, the identity.rs repository has seen a lot of progress, implementing many of the requirements of the DID and Verifiable Credential proposed standards from W3C.

Currently, the team is also exploring the integration and collaboration with Stronghold to deliver IOTA Identity with a default, strong security model, protecting your digital identities. The team is on track for an IOTA Identity 1.0 release before the end of the year. This release will enable decentralized identity applications in production, but might miss some ease of use and tooling for the developers. These will be developed over the next year.

IOTA Streams

The Streams team has been working on changes to the implementation that allows for functionality like multi-publisher support, as well as changing the existing processes into a binary form to improve performance on existing hardware.

All the changes will be part of a pre-release coming this Friday! Stay tuned on our Discord and Twitter for more information on the release.

IOTA Experience Team

The community involvement in the IOTA Experience Teams is steadily growing.

Luca#3952, joined the GoShimmer and Permanode Experience Teams and set up a 0.2.1 Chronicle permanode and provided useful examples for the community.

The IOTA Access Experience Team had a session with Bernardo Araujo during which it was possible to preview the source code of IOTA Access SDK.

Two other IOTA community members joined the IOTA GoShimmer Experience Team: MaKla#4289 and Maik Piel#8401, this X-Team is involved in testing the drand software integration with GoShimmer and has set up a seven member dRNG committee to support Angelo Capossele in the research to reach the 0.3.0 milestone for Pollen.

daverl#0001 (a.k.a. Dave [EF] and svenger87#8523 installed the alpha version of Bee and contributed to the Bee X-Team initiative with valuable feedback.

To get started, discover the IOTA Experience Team on GitHub, explore the IOTA Experience Initiatives and then apply through this form.

Roadmap updates

We have made the following updates to our roadmap:

The next IOTA Streams release has been moved to September.
The Permanode release with solidification support has been moved to September.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!

Dev Status Update — August, 2020

Jakub Cech — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 16:44:38 GMT

Dev Status Update — August, 2020

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.

The research department is also releasing a monthly update that you might want to see.

IOTA 1.5

IOTA 1.5 (also known as Chrysalis) is the mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

The Chrysalis phase 1 components have been implemented in the Hornet node and deployed to the comnet network. On comnet, spam tests have reached a value of ~1500 TPS and over a 1000 CTPS. Most value transactions on comnet are confirmed within 10 seconds of sending.

We will be releasing Chrysalis (IOTA 1.5) Phase 1 on mainnet on August 19, 2020.

If you are running a node make sure you upgrade it

Make sure you upgrade your nodes from IRI to Hornet. If you want to migrate your old IRI DB to Hornet so that you can retain history, you can use the following migration tool. IRI will not be supported after the Chrysalis phase 1 upgrade.

The network’s coordinator address will change to:

UDYXTZBE9GZGPM9SSQV9LTZNDLJIZMPUVVXYXFYVBLIEUHLSEWFTKZZLXYRHHWVQV9MNNX9KZC9D9UZWZ

With the upgrade to Chrysalis phase 1. When first running your node after the Chrysalis upgrade, you will need to overwrite the coordinator address using Hornet’s --overwriteCooAddress parameter.

API changes in Hornet nodes

The checkConsistency API call is being removed.
The attachToTangle `mwm` parameter is now optional.
The getTransactionsToApprove the `depth` parameter is being removed.
A new getTipInfo that returns whether a transaction is confirmed, conflicting, should be promoted, or should be reattached.

Promotion and reattachment logic changes

In most cases and during normal network operation, the need for promoting and reattaching transactions should be very limited compared to the pre-Chrysalis network. However, we recommend using the getTipInfo API call to determine whether you should promote or reattach your transaction.

Chrysalis phase 2

The work on Chrysalis phase 2 is well underway as well. From wallet software, to specifications and implementations. You can see the specifications we have published for Chrysalis phase 2 here. We encourage you to provide feedback.

Pollen

Further improvements of the Pollen network are well underway. Specifically, the latest version of the GoShimmer node software, v0.2.3 (released just this week), brings improvements on the synchronization and the dashboard.

The team is already working on the next large milestone, Nectar. The components that will make up the Nectar network will be iteratively released on the testnet in the upcoming months, starting from the distributed Random Number Generator (dRNG).

You can read more about Pollen, Nectar, and Honey, concepts we introduced to talk about the milestones on the path to Coordicide in this post.

You can follow the project on its GitHub repository. If you want to get involved, check out our updated contributing guidelines.

Bee

The Bee team has been hard at work implementing Chrysalis phase 1 and other node components and releasing individual crates. The initial crates have also been audited by an external party. We plan on releasing the first alpha version of the Bee node in the upcoming weeks. We will start testing the node on comnet next week as we build up the functionality for Chrysalis phase 2.

The team has also been doing regular live stream coding sessions every Friday at 5PM CEST. The first coding sessions are available here. Join us for the next session!

You can find all Bee RFCs in their respective GitHub repository.

Hornet

The team released a 0.4.2 version of Hornet a few weeks back and is now testing an RC version of the new Chrysalis node implementation on comnet. The Chrysalis implementation achieved ~1500 TPS and over 1000 CTPS when stress-tested on comnet. We plan on releasing the full version of the next Hornet version for mainnet next week.

If you would like to take part in the tests, please head to the #comnet and #hornet channels on our Discord.

Previously, we released an Open Source Series Hornet installation video by Luca Moser that you can watch here. You can also watch the Hornet installation party video by Antonio Nardella as part of the IOTA Experience Team.

IRI

As noted in this blog post, IRI 1.8.6 was the last release of IRI that we are actively planning. If you have not switched to Hornet, please make so before the Chrysalis phase 1 upgrade happening next week. IRI will not be supported on the IOTA mainnet after Chrysalis phase 1.

If you want to migrate your old IRI DB to Hornet so that you can retain history, you can use the following migration tool.

Smart contracts

The team has been progressing towards the first PoC of our new smart contracts integration. Lately with focus on switching to the GoShimmer core APIs and with adding new smart contracts for the initial implementation. The VM part of the team has been working on finishing up the Wasm VM that will be integrated with the Wasp node.

We plan on finishing the initial PoC for our smart contracts in September.

Stronghold

At the end of July, we released the first version of Stronghold. Stronghold is a collection of multipurpose libraries for securely managing passwords, personal data, and private keys. We will be using Stronghold in our Chrysalis wallet implementation. Stronghold is written in Rust and you can check it out here.

Wallet

Development is progressing nicely on both the Stronghold and Wallet libraries. We hope to open up the Wallet library to the community very soon. Meanwhile, the final details of the new wallet’s architecture have been ironed out, including our usage of the actor model. Individual components (e.g. Stronghold, Wallet, UI) exist as ‘actors’ within the wallet, communicating with one another via messages. Applying such a structure gives greater assurances of security, isolating each component to ensure they don’t share memory. With the wallet supervisor and UI actors implemented, we are now in a position to start building out the wallet front end. Other work has involved speccing out the chat and contact system (using the Matrix protocol), as well as updating Trinity to accommodate for Chrysalis part 1 next week.

UX and design work is coming to a close — well-timed for beginning front-end development. We are extremely pleased with the direction we have arrived at, amounting to a significant upgrade in usability when compared to Trinity (and the whole industry). Design and research are complete. Now is the time to ramp up development and implement it all.

IOTA Streams

The team will also be adjusting the functionality to support changes made for Chrysalis phase 2.

Permanode

We have released a new implementation of the Permanode in Rust, Chronicle alpha 0.1 last month. The solution is highly customizable and extendable while making it simple to use with the CLI application. You can read more about the release here.

The team has been working on additional functionality, like paging support, extending the findTransactions response, adding MQTT support and more. At the moment, the team is building up gossip and solidification support.

Roadmap updates

We have made the following updates to our roadmap:

The IOTA Smart contracts timeline has changed. The Smart contracts PoC is now slated for September 2020, instead of August 2020.
The Bee timeline for a mainnet release has been pushed from August 2020 to September 2020. We will spend the time testing the node on the comnet.

We also reorganized and renamed some of the items on the roadmap in order to better reflect the terms we are using.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!

IOTA 1.5 (Chrysalis phase 2) RFCs

Jakub Cech — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 14:53:36 GMT

A list of Chrysalis phase 2 RFC pull requests. The RFCs serve as initial protocol specifications for the changes coming later this year.

Please provide feedback on the RFCs, or join our Discord if you have questions.

Message object RFC (PR #17, Rendered)
Transaction structure RFC (#18, Rendered)
Milestone payload RFC (#19, Rendered)
Bech32 address format (#20, Rendered)

The colored coins RFC will be shared in the coming days.

Dev Status Update — July, 2020

Jakub Cech — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:55:04 GMT

Dev Status Update — July, 2020

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.

The research department is also releasing a monthly update that you might want to see.

Chrysalis

Chrysalis (also known as IOTA 1.5) is the Mainnet’s intermediate stage before Coordicide is complete. You can read more about the strategy for releasing Chrysalis here.

Both Bee and Hornet teams are currently working on implementing Chrysalis phase 1 features. You can see the specifications in the linked RFCs, as well as comment and contribute yourself:

Weighted Uniform Random Tip Selection (Protocol RFC #8 — Merged)
White Flag (Protocol RFC #5 — Merged)
Milestone Merkle Validation (Protocol RFC #12)

We anticipate the Chrysalis phase 1 milestones to be ready once the development phase, together with the audit of the functionality, concludes for both Hornet and Bee. This will introduce the changes mentioned here to the IOTA Mainnet.

Bee

The Bee team is getting closer to release the first alpha version of the Rust node implementation together with Chrysalis phase 1. At this point, the team is moving components from the prototype implementation to the main Bee repository. Necessary crates are also being prepared for an external audit.

We are also putting together an approach that will allow us to easily prototype solutions in the future when the node software is released.

As mentioned previously, you can now find the merged Bee RFCs in the Bee RFC book.

The team has also been doing regular live stream coding sessions every Friday at 5PM CEST. The first coding sessions are available here. Join us for the next session!

You can find all Bee RFCs in their respective GitHub repository.

Hornet

The team released an 0.4.1 version of Hornet. The Hornet team is now working on implementing Chrysalis phase 1 features for the next major version of Hornet. Specifically URTS and the White flag approach.

IRI

The last version of IRI, 1.8.6 has been released. As noted in this blog post, IRI 1.8.6 was the last release of IRI that we are actively planning. We encourage everyone to switch to Hornet in the upcoming weeks, but no later than with the release of Chrysalis phase 1 in the second half of July.

If you want to migrate your old IRI DB to Hornet so that you can retain history, you can use the following migration tool.

Pollen Testnet

Last month, we released Pollen, the first testnet version based on GoShimmer to include Fast Probabilistic Consensus. The release had a great reception and the network now has more than 250 active nodes. The team has since released a minor version with a couple of fixes. We are now working on resolving a situation and coming up with a fix for synchronization issues between the nodes.

The team will also be planning the outstanding work necessary for the major release, Nectar. Nectar will include the rest of the missing Coordicide components, such as mana, rate control, adaptive PoW, just to mention a few.

You can read more about Pollen, Nectar, and Honey, concepts we introduced to talk about the milestones on the path to Coordicide in this post.

You can follow the project on its GitHub repository. If you want to get involved, check out our updated contributing guidelines.

Smart contracts

The team has been working on the virtual state, VM wrapper and abstraction logic, and will be working on the Wasm VM PoC in the pluggable framework of the Wasp node.

The team has also implemented the first hard coded smart contract. The hard coded smart contract will serve as a basis for testing the implementation of the whole approach, and the team will build a dashboard and tooling for it.

Wallet

The team has mostly finalized the specifications of the new wallet that will be built for Chrysalis phase 2. We are now progressing with both the initial implementations of the wallet library and the library for secure store and management of private keys. We are also setting up the initial build continuous integration and delivery systems for both the desktop and mobile wallets that will support us throughout the actual development phase.

Streamlining the User Experience of the wallet is a continual area of focus since the initial inception of the project. The team is reworking all user flows, from the initial wallet entry, to strengthened security, ensuring they are as straightforward and easy to use as possible. Together, with that, we are also significantly evolving the initial designs of the wallet.

Trinity and Spark maintenance remain ongoing tasks but no new features are currently planned, and they will be deprecated with the launch of Chrysalis and the new wallet.

IOTA Streams

The Streams team is working on changes to the implementation that allow for functionality like multi-publisher support, as well as changing the existing processes into a binary form to improve performance on existing hardware. All the changes will be part of a larger release that we plan for August.

Permanode

We have released a new implementation of the Permanode in Rust, Chronicle alpha 0.1 last week. This implementation supports the functionality that you know from the previous version and will be extended with a dashboard, solidification support, and more in the future.

The solution is highly customizable and extendable while making it simple to use with the CLI application. You can read more about the release here.

Or go directly to the documentation and the chronicle-discussion Discord channel.

Roadmap updates

We have made the following updates to our roadmap:

The IOTA Streams timeline has changed from July 2020 to August 2020. We have increased the scope of the next version and expect the next version to be ready in August.

As always, we welcome everyone to stop by on Discord — every project mentioned here has a channel (or more) for discussion with the devs!