The hardware component of the cryptocurrency industry is at times overlooked in discussions related to the field. That has slowly been changing with the advent of new and improved machines to facilitate better networking capabilities.
IOTA, the cryptocurrency based on the Internet of Things revealed a lot of plans for 2020 earlier this month but now it has also received a hardware boost.
In his latest blog, Bernardo Rodrigues spoke about the honeycombOS release which was launched to make IOTA and the Tangle network more seamless. The honeycombOS is an embedded Linus Distribution tailored for IOTA nodes, clients and Tangle related tools.
The operating system will be majorly based on Poky and will take tools from OpenEmbedded and the Yoto Project. Poky is a reference distribution of the Yocto Project which contains the OpenEMbedded Build System as well as data to build one’s own distro.
The Yocto Project as a whole was created as an open-source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linus based systems. This would be done regardless of the system and hardware architecture. The latest honeycomb OS will work on meta-iota which will also be supported by the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund. The IEDF webpage claims that it wants to empower development and innovation within the IOTA ecosystem by funding ideas across the globe.
The IEDF chooses projects based on merit and according to the developers of honeycombOS, it performs better than standard distros like DietPi, Armbian, etc. The functionalities of the honeycombOS were stated in its official release as:
“honeycombOS is meant to be as minimalist and light as possible, so all CPU power is used for Tangle related computations. Therefore, there’s no GUI, and everything needs to be done via terminal. honeycombOS is 100% cross-compiled from source, which means community feedback will drive improvements for next iterations”
At present time, the honeycombOS only contains the Hornet v0.3.0 which does not contain all the functionalities of IOTA’s IRI [IOTA Reference Implementation]. The IRI runs on nodes in the public IOTA networks where clients can transfer IOTA as well as other cryptocurrencies. honeycombOS’s has only been tested on the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, with later iterations to be tested out soon.
The aforementioned developments are aimed to bolster IOTA’s mainstream adoption which in turn will affect the cryptocurrency’s price. At press time, IOTA was trading for $0.25 with a total market cap of $699.4 million. After a 2.43 percent increase on the daily chart, the 24-hour market volume was at $8.74 million.