Late to this but of interest, the IOTA Foundation, mentioned here a number of times, was an interesting change in the idea of blockchains and how they were delivered. I was impressed by the direction of their methods. But it clearly needed quite a bit of live testing to proof. Due to a number of emerging problems, and losses, they have decided to make major changes, which were announced this February, below the intro to the announcement, with the rest attached. Will follow as I can. See also the IOTA Foundation Blog.
IOTA - A new dawn Announcements, Feb 05, 2021
The launch of the first IOTA mainnet in June 2016 was the start of our journey to revolutionize Blockchain. We introduced the very first distributed ledger based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) - a scalable and lightweight protocol to overcome rising costs and power consumption by removing miners and fees. We called it “the Tangle”. The Tangle was designed to be a more equitable, democratic and secure network, where every node would directly contribute towards the security of the overall system.
Our vision was that this system would go on to revolutionise industries, from Automotive to Supply Chain, Industrial IoT to Personal Identity, ushering in a wave of innovation that would coalesce in the formation of an altogether new economy - the Machine Economy - where devices would exchange information, value and digital assets autonomously.
In pursuit of this vision, we began a quest that would mean breaking down barriers by sometimes taking unconventional steps. This included a fundamental deviation from technical norms, which to onlookers made us an outsider, and to our community, an underdog. But by going against the grain to create something new, we made some missteps along the way.
Some of our early design decisions were found to be suboptimal, others reaching far beyond the foreseeable horizon. This was not only perceived by members of the IOTA Foundation, but also a range of external developers, security researchers, enterprises and organisations, who together contribute to the development of the IOTA protocol.
In our interactions outside the community, criticism has sometimes been dismissed too quickly and a number of situations have not been handled appropriately. Maturing means admitting the poor decisions from our past, and publicly showing our commitment to the principles of collaboration, transparency and openness. We can only move forward by admitting to these mistakes today, and by building and rebuilding bridges in 2021.
We have to dare to continuously reinvent ourselves and improve our technologies, in order to fulfil our vision. Being a pioneer in a nascent, fast-paced industry means that you get some things right, while others have to be discarded. “Fail fast, fail early and fail often” they say. We did, and we have learned from our failures, and have become a stronger, more mature organization and ecosystem as a result.
Acting on your feedback
With the upcoming upgrade to the Tangle we will conclude our efforts to resolve the outstanding technical issues and inefficiencies. The name “Chrysalis” represents a fundamental, natural transformation into one’s mature form. An apt name for the upgrade we are about to undertake.
In August 2020 we released the first set of changes to push IOTA towards production readiness, “Chrysalis Part 1”. The release of the second and final part of Chrysalis is now approaching, with which we will deliver major improvements in performance, stability, reliability, and security. We will replace exotic aspects of the protocol with established standards and provide a wealth of new tooling for developers, enterprises and exchanges.
Chrysalis is the most extensive upgrade in IOTA’s history, touching all aspects of the protocol, libraries, wallets and software implementations developed by the IOTA Foundation. It truly marks “a new dawn” for IOTA, becoming production ready and forming a foundation for upcoming features like smart contracts and tokenization. With these long-awaited features, our community will be able to build many of the compelling innovations we have seen in the last few months, including scalable Automated Market Makers, feeless decentralized finance platforms, powerful oracles, and smart contract based startups that can leverage the power of the IOTA Tangle. .....