IOTA test network for new consensus model almost ready

• The first public test network for the IOTA “Tangle Multiverse”, a completely new consensus model, is nearing completion.
  
• After IOTA 2.0, the new concept could make the Tangle much more secure, resilient and efficient.

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Hans Moog, developer at the IOTA Foundation, announced on Twitter that he and his GoShimmer team last week succeeded in implementing a potentially revolutionary step for IOTA 2.0. According to Moog, the potential “heart” of IOTA 2.0, the new “Parallel Reality Based Ledger State” test network has been successfully implemented. The consensus concept used in it is completely new and is based on an idea that Moog already presented in November 2019.

The “Tangle Multiverse” completely decouples the consensus and state tracking of the ledger, but is so far only a Moog concept that is currently being researched and tested. According to the roadmap for IOTA 2.0, which is to be introduced by the end of the year, work is currently underway to implement the Fast Probabilistic Consensus (FPC) protocol using a UTXO model.

But as Moog describes, his new consensus model for the IOTA Tangle could bring significant benefits. It is also revolutionary because it is the first time in a decade that a completely new ledger state model is being created. The blockchain and crypto scene has always used either the UTXO or the account-based model:

This completely new form of keeping track of the state of a DLT will be the “heart” of IOTA 2.0 and beyond and will give us a level of flexibility that has never been seen before. […] It is the first time since more than a decade that we see a completely new ledger state model emerge as everybody else still uses the vanilla UTXO- and account-based models.

It is most probably one of the most efficient ways to track the state of a decentralized system and might even use similar mechanisms as the universe itself (see @stephen_wolfram  new theory of physics).

In a blog post already published in November 2019, Moog explained that he is often asked why IOTA needs a new consensus model when Coordicide already solves the blockchain trilemma. He states that the new consensus mechanism could make the Tangle “orders of magnitude more secure”, have a lower message overhead, and be completely resistant to large-scale network splits. Among many other advantages, the network topology could be kept completely secret, making autopeering much easier to implement and Eclipse attacks much more difficult.

Via Twitter, Moog now wrote that the first public testnet is almost ready. In one of his tweets he expressed his enthusiasm for the work of his team:

Thank you to the amazing goshimmer team that not only grasped the concepts in just a few weeks but that also helped testing this “mind boggling” new approach. The emerging complexity of this system is really crazy (see the first picture) and it took us thousands of lines.

At the same time, he announced that only the coding of a library is needed to communicate with the nodes and the network. Accordingly, the first public test network is now within reach:

It was a lot of work and I have been sitting up many nights to tame this beast. But now it is finally done and we can start with the “fun stuff”. We are getting really really close to the first public test network as the only thing that is missing is to write a library that allows us to interact with the nodes and the network! Exciting times ahead!

If you want to know how the Tangle Multiverse works in detail, we recommend the old blog posts by Hans Moog on Medium.