After years of intensive research, rigorous testing, and tireless efforts by our engineers, we are proud to finally be able to invite everyone to participate in this momentous milestone for the IOTA project. Pollen marks the beginning of the world’s first truly decentralized, scalable, and fee-less Distributed Ledger, which has been IOTA’s promise since day one. Pollen is the first phase in IOTA’s three-part release strategy that will culminate in our coordinator-less, production-ready network: IOTA 2.0. Pollen is a rapidly developing research testbed where the community, researchers and engineers can test and validate the concepts of IOTA 2.0.

Pollen represents a major upgrade with respect to the previous Alphanet v0.1.3 release. We roughly count 60000 additions and 25000 deletions to the codebase. We have built the foundation for a functional coordinator-less network. From here, iterative improvements to the code will transform Pollen into the final, feature-complete release candidate for IOTA 2.0.

Today’s release includes the following main feature updates:

• Fast Probabilistic Consensus — IOTA’s new consensus algorithm for a decentralized network. You can read the research paper here.
• Value Transactions — network participants can now use an automated faucet to receive tokens, send value transactions (via a wallet) and test conflict resolution on the network.
• Tokenized Assets — individuals can now ‘color’ IOTA tokens with different attributes that represent real-world assets such as buildings, IoT devices, or even company equity.
• Prometheus and Grafana integration — node operators can now monitor several metrics by enabling a Grafana dashboard.
• Feeless dApps — this release includes a future capability for the IOTA ecosystem: the development of feeless decentralized applications.

We have also improved previously released features from the last version of the Alphanet. These include improved stability and instrumentation of both the autopeering and the gossip modules. We have built an enriched dashboard with a brand new Tangle explorer and visualizer. The analysis-server has been refactored from the ground up to support not only the visualization and analysis of the autopeering network but also the real-time update of the Fast Probabilistic Consensus protocol in action.

#iota #blockchain #bitcoin #pollen