IRIS Testnet v0.1 Release: Codename Pangu
Greetings, dear friends
IRISnet is designed to be the foundation for next generation distributed business applications. IRISnet will be able to transfer the values between heterogeneous blockchain systems via interoperability. Interoperability is one of the biggest challenges with existing public blockchain solutions. Whilst there are various different approaches to solving the interoperability problem,like: Polkadot, Fusion,Wanchain….. Cosmos offers us the most powerful and ready to use solution.
The vision of Cosmos is to build the Internet of blockchain. This internet will have a bunch of Hubs & Zones. We expect to see the first Hub — Cosmos Hub launch in weeks. IRISnet will launch IRIS hub afterwards. IRISnet will enhance Interblockchain Communication(IBC) protocol of Cosmos to introduce service-oriented infrastructure into ecosystem to make building/deploying distributed applications more efficiently. The IRIS services allows more complicated resources such as data service and computing being invoked blockchains:public, consortium and legacy systems.
The Journey So far
IRIS hub is designed to be the regional hub in Cosmos ecosystem. And all the hubs will be built with Cosmos-SDK. Cosmos-SDK will be the cool toolkit for developers. It offers all the fundamental functions for a simple Proof-of-Stake blockchain , like: Staking, Bank, Auth, Governance and IBC. You can read more about Cosmos-SDK in this blog.
But Cosmos-SDK is not a finished product. The codebase is constantly updating. IRIS hub is built on Cosmos-SDK and inherited SDK’s modular architecture. The team spent a lot of time studying the design pattern of Cosmos-SDK and how to realize the goals stated in our Whitepaper.
The team went through codebase and Cosmos-SDk and worked along with the Cosmos team to fix bugs. We have looked into the issue of upgradability of a hub and how to gracefully handle a byzantine failure and recovery strategy.
Testnet Release
We are happy to share with you testnet v1.0, codenamed Pangu. In Chinese mythology, Pangu is the first living being and the creator of all. He is the ancient Chinese god, who devoted himself to create the whole world. We are inspired by his perseverance and strength.
We first released a testnet with 7 nodes running on Aliyun. For the last few weeks, we have been mostly focused on developping support to Pangu such as a light-client wallet(Rainbow), a blockchain explorer(IRISPLORER), a monitor tool and their integration with the system.
What you can do with Pangu?
You will be able to get some IRIS token from faucet, then give some back to help keep the faucet running.
You will be able to send transactions through our Rainbow to the network and use IRISPLORER to check the status of their transactions and other network and protocol parameters such as previously proposed blocks, transactions accepted by the network and the transaction throughput among others.
Users will be able to get the status of all 7 validators. We designed the validators to have similar voting powers from the begining. Users will become a delegator in a Proof-of-stake blockchain. After acquiring IRIS token, they could delegate to through our Rainbow to a chosen validator. The details were discussed in this post.
What’s next?
Please note that Pangu is the first version of our testnet and we will be continuously updating the testnet in the coming weeks. The staking and bank modules will reflect the changes.
The network performance is key and the next version of testnet will improve its performance on high-throughput. Also, we will put more constraints, so validator nodes could join and leav the network without interrupting the protocol.
We plan to increase the scale of testnet. But we still require some more time to improve the stability of our implementation before inviting community members to run nodes for the testnet.
To learn more about IRISnet or to discuss technical aspects of our project, please feel free to connect with us in any of our official channels below:
Telegram: https://t.me/irisnetwork
Twitter:https://twitter.com/irisnetwork
Github: https://github.com/irisnet
