Why is Chrysalis Pt. 2 an extremely important milestone for IOTA?
Last night, the IOTA Foundation (IF) announced on the official Twitter that today into the official opening of the test network for Chrysalis Pt. 2.
For people with non-technical backgrounds who have not been following the development progress of IOTA for a long time, or who are not particularly familiar with the technical path of IOTA, they may not have much sense of its testing and the subsequent launch. But in fact, this release can be called an important milestone release and is also closely related to IOTA’s most important Coordicide program. As for why? It can be shared from the following points.
Please bear with me if some of the content is likely to be a bit off due to my native language, or less in-depth understanding of technology.
Chrysalis is the most complete preparation for next year’s network upgrade to Coordicide
The sharpest part of the criticism of IOTA has been that IOTA’s current network needs a mechanism called Coordinator, a node managed by IF itself to issue a special transaction according to a specific cycle, which is used to secure the whole network. Obviously, the existence of this coordinator goes against the basic idea of decentralization that is usually emphasized in distributed ledgers. Although the partners are not too resistant to this in the industrial application area where IOTA is rooted, they have been trying to remove this coordinator completely and name the attempt as Coordicide since the very beginning of IOTA, and have made very many attempts to do so. But based on IOTA’s special network structure and the no-fee nature it insists on, the issue didn’t have its most mature solution until last year — namely, the two alternative consensus schemes of FPC and CA.
However, to implement this solution, IOTA needs to adjust from many original mechanisms, such as switching from the Account model to UTXO model, new auto-peering mechanism, new Tip selection mechanism, etc. Only when these prerequisites are done, the new consensus can be deployed finally.
To reduce the difficulty of the final Coordicide launch and ensure the smooth progress of the whole Coordicide, they decided to put the prerequisite work other than consensus online and fully tested in an intermediate version first, and this work was carried out in this version of Chrysalis, and the Pt.2 phase version took the biggest adjustment.
Simply put, the success of Chrysalis Pt.2 will go a long way in clearing the way for the final Coordicide.
Chrysalis Pt.2 will bring several features that will be of interest to the community and have a positive impact on the price of tokens.
I. Reusable Address
To ensure the security of data and value, IOTA insists on adopting a quantum crack-resistant algorithm and corresponding mechanism to deal with addresses and transactions, but this mechanism has a requirement that users cannot adapt to. enforces that once a Token has been transferred out of an address, it can no longer be used and a new address must be used. This is obviously incompatible with other cryptocurrencies and makes it very difficult for those who use it.
This address reuse problem will be completely solved in this version of Pt.2, which will greatly increase the usability of the wallet.
II. coloured-coin mechanism
The general principle of coloured-coin will not be elaborated in this article, but in terms of usage, it will enable the mapping of real assets on IOTA Token, so you can publish your assets in a simpler way and exchange and transfer them for free based on IOTA’s own 0-fee transmission feature.
IOTA’s coloured-coin mechanism will give many asset issuers a more competitive alternative to Ethereum.
At the same time, since you need a certain amount of IOTA for asset mapping, this will also create a new rigid demand for IOTA Token, which will undoubtedly give some support to the price of IOTA as well.
In this version of Pt.2, the coloured-coin mechanism will be implemented at the network level, and the actual functionality will be officially opened in the subsequent version of the supporting Firefly wallet.
III. Smart Contract
After IOTA abandoned the original smart contract path from Jinn, Eric Hop’s team redesigned and implemented the POC for smart contracts. This new smart contract framework does not need to wait for Coordicide to be implemented before it can go online. It will follow after Chrysalis Pt. 2 goes live.
The implementation of smart contracts will undoubtedly bring more application scenarios to IOTA, including the now very popular Defi solution.
Chrysalis Pt. 2 is a further fulfilment of IOTA’s production-ready promise
When Chrysalis Pt.1 went live, IOTA had already defined it as production-ready, which brought higher TPS and CTPS limits, and the renaming of several components, such as Access, Identity, Stream, etc., reflected at one level the need for IF to focus more on partner adoption. The Pt.2 release will not only bring higher TPS and CTPS limits but also further improve the overall network stability. It also provides a more convenient upper layer library to facilitate partners’ business integration.
At the same time, the features in Chrysalis Pt.2 also remove the technical barriers for certain exchanges to shelve IOTA, which will undoubtedly increase the liquidity of IOTA as well.
Chrysalis Pt. 2 is a battlefield test of the new IOTA development infrastructure
After the Go-based Hornet node software became the main online version in Chrysalis Pt.1, IOTA stopped the development of the original Java-based IRI version and started to develop a new generation of components based on Rust, including Bee, Stronghold and Firefly. These new-generation components will be tested for the first time in Chrysalis Pt. 2, which is also a test of IOTA’s new development base framework, and this test will bring the best lessons for the subsequent adherence to Rust as the main development language.
Finally, as a member of the community, I would like to pay tribute to the researchers and engineers who have contributed to this effort and wish Chrysalis good luck in its testing.
