IOV’s First Public Alphanet is Live: Devs Can Join the Network and Try It Now!

We are very proud to announce that our first public testnet launched on Friday, August 31st. Two versions are active: “Friend Net Fast,” which generates a new block every second, and “Friend Net Slow,” which only creates a block when a transaction occurs. These are developer based, not browser based, so curious and interested devs can begin playing with the network on Github here!

This release is proof to the world that our devs are making incredible progress through our development roadmap and we’re well on our way to releasing an interoperability solution that will make waves through the blockchain industry and, we believe, change it for the better.

For those not familiar with IOV’s unique vision, our concept is to provide a protocol that is truly designed to be universal, because our blockchain doesn’t attempt to place itself at the center of the ecosystem. Instead, any existing or future blockchain can implement the protocol to become compatible with our universal wallet or easily launch ICO’s that can natively accept any supported token without requiring any extra legwork of their dev teams.

We believe that any platform attempting to monopolize the value in the protocol layer of the blockchain ecosystem, by placing itself at the center, is unlikely to succeed — because the history of the internet already teaches us that the massive adoption of groundbreaking technology doesn’t happen that way. Instead, protocols that facilitate healthy collaboration are required, meaning, an infrastructure must be in place which affords even competing parties more advantages by participating than not.

To become universally adopted, in other words, the protocol must be of universal benefit. This is how the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) came to be adopted, so we’re developing a Blockchain Name System (BNS) modeled on that approach, along with an accompanying Blockchain Communication Protocol (BCP) that is extremely easy and straightforward to implement, since it is designed to the requirements of facilitating standardization across the industry in the easiest possible way for blockchain project teams.

For now, what our first public testnet provides is a wallet ready blockchain network, with a faucet integrated into the wallet, and a PEX Service to share node_id and IP. We hope that this intrigues the broader development community to play with the network and participate in testing it — as a major step in building a groundbreaking technology as well as a community of talented enthusiasts, from which we hope to source more skilled blockchain programmers in the months to come!

In addition to the IOV-Core readme linked above, devs interested in running a fullnode can check out our validator guide, and an info page (still WIP) has been started for those who want to interact with our apps. Keep in mind that this first testnet release has been dubbed “Friend Net” because friends take care of the network: it’s currently not DDOS proof, and things may go wrong because we can’t guarantee that it’s completely stable yet. You may face rate limits and issues with concurrent calls on the faucet (as indicated here). Please also note that this network is not permanent, and it may be reset without notice. However, basic activity should not break the system, and we are aiming to provide 99% uptime provided that users practice positive citizenship.

If you’d like to discuss the release or have questions about IOV, we encourage you to drop into our Mattermost chat. You can sign up here for the #Community channel, and if you’re a dev let us know and we’ll invite you to our #Developers channel!

For those of you who are devs, the best way to stay up to date is starring our GitHub repositories: for IOV-Core and for Weave.

Also, we encourage everyone to Follow Us On Twitter for updates on the latest IOV news. We’re in the early days of building our advanced user community and everyone counts to us, especially in this exciting stage at the ground level of everything we’re doing now. So thank you for being a supporter of IOV, and we look forward to seeing all of you who are devs on testnet!