IOTA has been in the news throughout the year following an array of developments pertaining to the network. Lengthening the list, the IOTA Foundation announced its latest Smart Contracts Platform.
IOTA Smart Contracts Protocol [ICSP]
The IOTA Foundation elaborated on the release of its latest platform in a blog post. The Foundation pointed out that the lOTA Smart Contracts Protocol [ICSP] was scalable, flexible as well as a feeless smart contracts platform. The IOTA Smart Contracts Pre-Alpha was made available to the community. The platform took to Twitter to make the announcement. The tweet read,
Another milestone! We're proud to release #IOTASmartContracts Pre-Alpha, our platform for scalable, feeless & flexible #smartcontracts for enterprise applications & real-world use cases. Start exploring the early capabilities of the platform today! https://t.co/e3ggGUCCIf#IOTA
— IOTA (@iota) October 2, 2020
The Foundation suggested that the latest release was merely an opportunity for developers to explore the prospects of the IOTA Smart Contracts Protocol. A full release of the product will reportedly hit the market in the coming months. The smart contracts on IOTA have been implemented on a distributed DAG-based UTXO ledger, aiding to the “flexible and feeless” aspect of the smart contract. This further permits IOTA smart contracts to be deployed for real-world use cases.
The blog post further read,
“IOTA Smart Contracts Protocol lays the foundation for a rich ecosystem to be developed, with a large variety of the extensions and building blocks that we anticipate will be created by the community.”
This release included prominent features such as Wasp node software version 0.0.1, three demo dApps, proof-of-concept [PoC] smart contracts called TokenRegistry, FairAuction, and DonateWithFeedback as well as CLI wallet. However, this release misses a pertinent section of the ISCP, the Wasm Virtual Machine as well as the Rust programming setting for smart contracts. The blog post pointed out that these would be released by the end of this year.
While the platform considers the release of the IOTA Smart Contracts Pre-Alpha a step towards the creation of something even bigger, the Foundation revealed the next steps for smart contracts in IOTA. This included maturation of core protocols, core security adjustments along with several other updates.
The Foundation further urged the community to explore IOTA’s latest venture and also requested for feedback.