Technical Progress Update February

[ - by ID.Iota]

GM 🌅 #IOTA Fam 🤖,

we have a new year and so comes a new update on the latest happenings around IOTA 2.0. The following article will give you an insight into the latest developments of iota core, the node protocol running IOTA 2.0.

What happened since the November?
Since the last monthly update the team did an overhaul on the iota core milestones. They left the old declaration of 1.0 / 1.0 RC / 1.1 / 1.1 RC behind and switched to a new declaration that more clearly indicates the state in which we currently are.

As you can see in the picture above, the team has relabeled the milestones and is now differentiating between four different stages of each release. The indication of each milestone can be read as shown in table below:

After v1.0.0 the next minor release will need to go through all of the stages above to come to the #IOTA mainnet.

So much to the milestones. Since we haven’t seen any public testnet to play with, we currently should be in v1.0.0-alpha, right? Correct. That’s exactly where we are. 3 weeks ago we saw the release of the first v.1.0.0-alpha.1 on GitHub. Following that initial release we have seen 4 additional alpha releases and thus currently are in v1.0.0-alpha.5. You can find the overview of the releases here.

As stated by muXxer the initial alpha release does not indicate any specific milestone, they did the initial release in order to get their GitHub CI workflow running. The CI workflow automates the building (compiling) of the current node software in order to make it easier for everyone to test it. See the short statement on the alpha release below.

While muXxer is pretty clear that we shouldn’t read too much into this alpha release he also states that the best indicator of progress is the amount of open issues on the iota core progress board.

Where are we currently with the node protocol?

So let’s have a look at the board of milestone v1.0.0-beta. As we can see in the board below, the team started to plan their work on issues in specific sprints. Their sprint length is 2 weeks. So they are planning to have all issues - shown in the overview below - resolved by the 14th of February.

Most of the issues to be addressed in the current sprint are bug fixes or API test cases. So on the node protocol itself nothing too crazy is happening. So let’s not spend too much time going through every single one. If you are interested in all of the specific issues addressed, you can find the project board here.

Issue #634 however, seems to be pretty interesting. Having a node running for a few days seems to lead to a slowly increasing memory (RAM). While the overall RAM consumption in the test has never surpassed 3,5 GB it shows that something in the code needs more and more RAM the longer the node runs. This is ultimately unwanted behavior and would lead to decreasing node performance over time.

So basically somewhere in the code data is written into the RAM and isn’t deleted afterwards. Currently it seems that this issue still exists on v1.0.0-alpha.4.

I don’t think this is a critical issue but might be one of those nasty bugs that need a few iterations of deep diving into the code base…

And what comes next?

So let’s assume the team planned their sprint according to what they think they will achieve until the 14th of February. Let’s also assume that all issues they are aware of up to now are created and listed on the iota core project board. If those assumptions are correct then only a very limited number of open issues are left. The remaining open issues don’t look as if they are critical bugs.

Let me be clear, it is likely and expected that the team will continue to find bugs, issues and necessary clean ups. Currently however it does look like there is end in sight.

To put that into perspective. Dom just recently talked on a KuCoin X-Space about releasing the IOTA 2.0 testnet in Q2 2024. The latest Shimmer Roadmap blog states that we should expect IOTA 2.0 on the Shimmer staging net this year. So I think the picture forming is that we will see a public testnet in the next months and then a few months of public testing with the community. Based on those steps it’s likely we will see the IOTA 2.0 update coming to Shimmer at the end of the year.

Being precise i don’t think we will see the IOTA 2.0 upgrade on the iota mainnet in 2024.

With that out of the way, we will see, feel and play with the biggest IOTA upgrade EVER in 2024. I remain optimistic and can’t wait for what this year will bring. Shimmer going L2 multi chain, IOTA EVM, RWAs on IOTA, IOTA 2.0 on a public testnet, IOTA 2.0 on Shimmer. 4$ EOY.