IOTA Foundation, a non-profit foundation focused on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and open-source ecosystem development, today announced that it has made a breakthrough step towards becoming a scalable and fully-decentralized distributed ledger technology.
The IOTA Foundation has unveiled a new website with the blueprint for the planned protocol upgrade, known as Coordicide, which provides a new, decentralized mechanism for securing the network. With this upgrade, IOTA is finally removing its centralized “Coordinator.” The IOTA community seeks to solve three fundamental problems with blockchain technology: high fees, scaling, and centralization.
IOTA developed the Coordinator to protect user funds while the network was in its infancy. The Coordinator is a security mechanism that ensures transaction finality and prevents double-spends. All Coordinator activity is validated by the nodes in the network, such that funds cannot be lost nor transactions reversed. From the outset IOTA has been vocal about its plans to eventually remove the Coordinator, giving frequent updates on its progress.
“We have been working towards the removal of the Coordinator since IOTA’s inception. Now with the maturity and growth of the protocol and the quality of our research team, we are bringing that promise to fruition. IOTA was designed to address the limitations of Blockchain with a feeless and scalable solution. That is now becoming a reality. With this major milestone, we are poised to accelerate into our next phase of growth and enterprise adoption in the real world.”
IOTA Grows Research Team and Finds Coordicide Solution
In recent months, the IOTA Foundation has expanded its research team and founded the IOTA Research Council. These efforts have aided in the development of an alternative, viable security mechanism that will enable the removal of the Coordinator. A detailed description is presented in the white paper released today.
The Future of the Tangle
At the heart of the Coordicide solution is a modular system that adds flexibility across all aspects of the IOTA protocol. This brings benefits of increased scalability, faster transaction finality, and easier node maintenance, as well as a variety of novel use cases. Data streaming services and other real-time applications become a real possibility with IOTA; use cases that are simply not feasible in other DLTs.
The Coordicide solution realizes IOTA’s promise as a lightweight and feeless ledger, overcoming the trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization that continues to limit other DLTs and blockchains.