Network developments have been the hallmark of the growing cryptocurrency industry and several coins have taken the motto to heart. IOTA, the cryptocurrency based on the Internet of Things [IoT] has been at the forefront of such developments and recently launched another update.
On February 3, IOTA announced that they had launched the Coordicide alphanet 0.1.0 to bolster the cryptocurrency’s network.
The alphanet was initially supposed to be released on the Rust-based node in the second quarter of 2020. IOTA decided to change directions because of the success attained by the company’s Hornet team.
IOTA stated that the alphanet will act as an important stepping stone towards reaching a coordinator-free IOTA mainnet. Coordicide also has multiple implementations within the network, with GoShimmer being its Go implementation.
The latest Coordicide implementation also has multiple features embedded in it. These features include Autopeering, Gossip, API and Rate Control. Autopeering allows automatic peer discovery and distance-based neighbor selection. The Gossip tag enables the network layer to send and receive new transactions.
To ensure that there is a controlled usage of the network, rate control was implemented. This feature is a temporary non-mana based rate control to limit transaction issuance. According to an official IOTA release:
“In our tests, a new node joining the network takes only a few seconds to discover and connect to neighbors. Similarly, when a node goes offline, its neighbors find an alternative within a few seconds. This responsiveness of the network is particularly important for the dynamic environments we are designing IOTA for, where nodes can join and become active at any time, for any period of time — especially important with sporadic connections.”
IOTA claimed that the future versions of GoShimmer will include a number of performance enhancements. The company further urged the community to contribute to the development of the IOTA ecosystem. The company also informed users that they were in the process of building multiple modules. These modules are slated to release one by one in accordance with IOTA’s roadmap.
The modules include Snapshots, Mana, Initial FPC implementation, Tip selection, and Mana-based rate control. The release comes in the wake of Sergey Invancheglo threatening legal action against fellow co-founder David Sonstebo. Invancheglo has accused his compatriot of embezzling 25 million MIOTA tokens.