Greetings to IOTA fans and all crypto friends! IOTA is still ongoing in their evolution to become the most successful project! These weeks the team worked fingers to the bone as usual! Last week they announced the full release of Trinity, a secure software wallet for IOTA tokens, developed by the IOTA Foundation. Reportedly, the wallet’s beta version has seen 160,000 downloads and transactions worth over $1.8 billion of IOTA. Cybersecurity firms SixGen andAccessec audited the application in advance of release. As a software wallet, Trinity is designed for compatibility with Ledger’s hardware wallets, as Ledger has worked alongside the IOTA Foundation since the end of 2018. Other reported features of the new wallet include Keepass-compliant security and encryption, biometric authentication, and availability in 25 languages and on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Qubic status update was published! Read more about all things related to Qubic on the IOTA blog. As for the social side, Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA, talked about how the foundation came to be, their new partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, and more in the interview with Voyager. He also featured in Nugget’s Crypto Podcast and explained IOTA vision for the future on BlockTV. Dan Simerman, Head of Financial Relations of IOTA Foundation, gave an exclusive interview to IOTA Hispano. Samuel Rufinatscha has joined IOTA as a Software Engineer on the Ict and Bee teams, building the future core node framework of IOTA. Duncan Main is joining IOTA as a Junior Project Manager within the Projects and Partners team. In this role, he will focus on the formal aspects of project management while engaging with IOTA partners and making sure projects run smoothly from initiation to delivery. The IOTA Barbecue Satellite TOA Event and IOTA Meetup in Berlin took place. As for upcoming events, the team will be presenting at OceanEx Germany Meetup next week. IOTA community and ecosystem are increasing in size and this is amazing. More to follow!
Development
GitHub metrics:
Development is ongoing. Commits on public GitHub appears regularly, several times a day.
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
IOTA Foundation Releases the Trinity Wallet:
The IOTA Foundation announced the full release of the Trinity wallet on all major mobile and desktop platforms.
Trinity started from humble beginnings as a Computer Science summer project at University College London. The project gained traction among the IOTA community, and as it grew and entered alpha testing, the talented team of community developers and designers took full-time positions within the IOTA Foundation. And now, with over $1.8 billion worth of IOTA transacted and over 160,000 downloads across all platforms, Trinity has become a resounding success. With the results of world-leading cybersecurity firms, SixGen’s security audit, the stable, feature-complete wallet has been released in full.
But the people involved in making Trinity what it is today extend far beyond the IOTA Foundation. This is and has always been a community project. IOTA had thousands of community members tirelessly testing across alpha and beta, submitting bug reports and making feature requests. Others diligently translating strings to allow support for over 25 languages. And others contributing to the wallet’s codebase. Ultimately this is a project that has involved thousands of contributions from thousands of people.
Trinity holds two principles at its core: user-friendliness and security. A wallet should be straightforward to use for new and advanced users alike, while securing funds and protecting from external attack. Applying these principles at every stage of the development process has given rise to a wallet that makes generating, storing and backing up seeds and sending and receiving IOTA an extremely simple and secure process.
Our industry-leading wallet, Trinity, delivers on IOTA’s goal to provide secure, accessible and community-driven token storage for the international cryptocurrency marketplace
-Dominik Schiener
Trinity is available across iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux. Download it here.
Read the press release here.
Qubic status update July 3rd 2019:
Ict, Coordicide, and, of course, Qubic.
The base node currently carries on the Bee name and will be written in Rust. It will include most of the common node components that are needed by all projects, all tied together with a flexible messaging architecture. The actual projects will be built on top of this. This means that some boundaries between projects will disappear and the team can move people around to help out where necessary more easily.
The base node will be based on the experiences they had while building each project and borrows several elements from those projects that they found would result in the best modular architecture. To make good usage of their resources most original Omega team members will be focused on building this new base node. The new design is such that the functionality of several IXIs will be absorbed in the new messaging architecture without sacrificing the flexibility of the architecture. It should allow for easy and flexible insertion and replacement of modules and it should also minimize repetition of efforts by multiple projects.
The new architecture supports the Qubic supervisor component directly and will make integrating the Q-node functionality more easy. And because the basic requirements for any node are now clear they can already start building this base node while the Coordicide team finalizes their specifications. So once these specifications appear they will be able to directly start implementing them on a working base node. Doing it this way removes a bottleneck where otherwise they would have had to wait for the specifications first before they would have been able to start working on the Coordicide node.
This last part is where the importance of being able to meet face to face really stood out. In only a few days the team was able to hammer out a solid proposal for the Bee node with the parties involved and clearly separate base functionality from specific functionality. That would have taken weeks of messaging otherwise.
Now let’s see what all this means for the projects.
Ict
Lukas and Samuel, together with community member /alex/ and a few others will start building the Bee base node. Once this common base node is done they will probably move on to adding the Ict-specific parts to get a working Ict/Bee again.
FPGA
The FPGA team just got bolstered by hiring Jonathan Shaffer (formerly known as Beeef). They are now working on a new idea that should allow them to run Abra-based tritcode directly on FPGA without the intermediate resource-intensive step of generating, compiling and synthesizing Verilog code. This is a breakthrough of huge magnitude. Instead of having to build from tritcode for every type of FPGA out there specifically, they now only need to generate tritcode once and can load and run it on the fly. They’re currently designing and building the first Proof of Concept of this new system.
Qupla
Part 7 in the series of articles that explore the depths of the Qubic Computation Model (QCM) is still nearing completion. With all the reshuffling Eric Hop’s management duties took precedence and there was no time to finish it. But rest assured that he will make it happen soon(tm).
Evaldas (lunfardo) has been working in on the Qubic project and will probably take over some of Erics’ duties in that regard to allow him to help direct the overall development efforts on all projects that will use the Bee platform.
Coordicide
With the integration of all projects in the same platform it seems only natural that they include the Coordicide efforts from now on as well. To be sure, this means that the Qubic status update has become a lot less Qubic-specific over time, and it may be that they will rebrand it to engineering update or something like that. The team is still deciding on that, but until that happens they will happily update you about any Coordicide specific news in this new section.
Devnet 1.8.0 upgrade has completed. All devnet node operators must upgrade to this version to keep in sync with the network.
IOTA Crypto Core FPGA — 5th Progress Report. This is the 5th progress report. In case you missed the 4th: link
Social encounters
Crypto Talk With Dominik Schiener, Founder of IOTA
Dominik Schiener talks about how the foundation came to be, their new partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, and more.
“IOT is going to be everything. Everything will be connected. Everything will be smart, and everything will need to be able to transact with each other.”
The Future Of IOTA With Co Founder Dominik Schiener
IOTA is hoping to change the way device communicate as we move into the digital internet of things age. Alex Saunders sit down with IOTA’s co founder Dominik Schiener to discuss everything you need to know about IOTA & their future plans.
One-on-one with IOTA Co-founder Dominik Schiener
Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA, explains their vision for the future.
Exclusive Interview with Dan Simerman, Head of Financial Relations of IOTA Foundation
Dan Simerman was a very active member of the IOTA Community before becoming part of the IOTA Foundation as Head of Financial Relations. He has a really impressive background that makes him an important asset for the growing relationships that IOTA is building. He is the one who has been in charge of creating a Financial Infrastructure for the IOTA economy neither more nor less. If you want to know more about Dan, his role within the IF and his insights about IOTA, take a couple of minutes, grab a cup of coffee and read this interview.
These weeks events:
July 4th, 2019: IOTA Barbecue — How Distributed Ledger Technology shapes our future. J Hafenküche, Zur alten Flussbadeanstalt 5, 10317 Berlin.
On July 4th a satellite event took place in the context of the TOA19 — the IOTA Barbecue. Interesting presentations by members of the IOTA Foundation about the current state of the development and prospects for what awaits us in the near future. Afterwards there was time for some networking at the barbecue. The event was organized by the IOTA Foundation.
Upcoming events:
July 17th, 2019: IOTA Meetup/Workshop in Berlin — Learn how to send data from the Bosch XDK to the IOTA Tangle via MAM even as a programming beginner — presented by XDK2MAM.io and IOTAshops.com
July 20th, 2019: OceanEx Germany Meetup, IOTA Head of Partnerships attending exchange meetup.
August 28th, 2019: IOTA Meetup Saarbrücken (Southwest Germany).
Finance
Information from Thetangle.org (11th July, 2019):
Wallets:
- Trinity Wallet for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux.
- Stateless Wallet for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux. Semi-deprecated, yet secure. If you can, please use Trinity instead. Please also note that as of May 31, 2018, the old Android Wallet is deprecated and should no longer be used.
Roadmap
Research & Development Roadmap: Status of projects in progress at the IOTA Foundation.
Research: Projects still in the research phase
- Coordicide
List and solve all the problems on the way to a Coo-less IOTA. This project is mostly theoretical, and includes threat analysis, mathematical modeling, simulation, and formalization of our consensus protocol.
- Spam prevention and detection
IOTA is looking for creative ways of dealing with FPGAs and asymmetric PoW. They are examining various options, mostly around the idea of throttling noisy neighbors. Their aim is to isolate spammers and protect the rest of the network.
- Automatic peer discovery
Given the community input and various ecosystem projects, IOTA is taking a closer look at the security implications of auto-peering. Although this is a complex research topic, it is important for the team to formulate a well-founded position on this matter, and carefully assess the risks involved.
- Economic Incentives
Continuing the recent efforts of Popov et al with their Nash Equilibria work, the team is analyzing the IOTA incentive model using increasingly more realistic game theoretical models. This incentive analysis plays a fundamental role in understanding the Tangle behavior and its stability when deployed at scale.
- Consensus Algorithm spec
IOTA is working on detailed spec of the Tangle consensus algorithm, building upon the foundation set by the white paper. The main purpose of this doc is allowing public peer review of the algorithm.
- Cryptography spec
This spec details all the cryptographic elements of IOTA: the hash functions, signing schemes, and threat model assumptions. The purpose of this document is to provide a basis for a public peer review and audit.
- Attack analysis
This project is related to the Coordicide efforts, and involves analytical and numerical analysis of various sorts of attacks, from the simplest side-chain double spend to the more complex thug, parasite chain, and splitting attacks. IOTA is working to get numerical estimations for the cost of attacking the network, and making sure the price tag stays prohibitively in the post-Coordinator world.
Engineering: Projects under active development
- Hub
While a number of exchanges have had great success integrating IOTA, it is certainly not the easiest task in the world. Hub simplifies exchange integration of IOTA so that IOTA can be listed in weeks, not months.
- IRI
The IOTA Reference Implementation is the de facto model for running an IOTA node. It is the place where both community and Foundation engineers meet and collaborate to improve the Tangle, and the focus of IOTA network target.
- Coo-free IRI
As it stands, IRI does not support the Tangle as described in the white paper. In order to support alternate consensus mechanisms, the current approach to consensus must be abstracted out so that it can later be replaced by a fully distributed mechanism. This project is separate from, but closely related to Coordicide, and this separation allows us to work on different parts of the problem in parallel.
- Qubic
Enable smart contracts, oracles, and outsourced computation on the Tangle.
- Trinity
While the original desktop IOTA wallet got the job done, it is not exactly the best in terms of user experience. With Trinity, IOTA brings a top quality user experience together with in-depth security audits, enabling more people to use IOTA easily and safely.
- Local Snapshots & Permanodes
Some IOTA nodes care about the entire history of the Tangle, and some don’t. As the Tangle scales, it would become impossible for smaller nodes to keep up. Allowing for local snapshots and permanodes are the ‘two sides of the same coin’ needed to allow for either permanent and selective storage as required for a particular use case.
- C Client
Most existing client libraries are written in higher-level languages unsuitable for embedded devices. Since IOTA is designed for the IoT, it will ultimately be necessary to support small, low-powered, embedded devices, and C is the ‘lowest common denominator’ programming language for many of these potential applications.
- MAM+
While MAM already exists, it is missing a few key features and documentation. A formal specification and improved version of MAM leveraging public-key encryption is currently being written by the experts from the Research Institute for Applied Problems of Mathematics and Informatics at Belarusian State University.
- Tanglescope
Performance and monitoring tools such as TangleScope allow researchers, engineers and interested 3rd parties to gain deeper insights into the Tangle’s network capabilities.
- PoWBox
One of the difficulties in developing for IOTA is waiting for Proof of Work results for every transaction. Additionally, small or low-powered devices may simply be unable to do PoW in a realistic timeframe. The PoWBox provides an example of how PoW may simply be outsourced to a more powerful machine, and demonstrates the flexibility of the IOTA protocol.
- iota.lib.js
The JavaScript client library is widely used for IOTA development, and serves as a reference point for client libraries in other languages.
- Curl+
Since replacing Curl-P with the industry standard Keccak hash function, IOTA has enlisted the help of the renowned cryptography experts from CyberCrypt. CyberCrypt’s experts will take what they’ve learned from Curl-P, work to understand IOTA’s specific requirements, and design a better, more secure lightweight hash function specifically for the IoT.
You can also follow the development on IOTA Official Discord.
Partnerships and team members
New IOTA Foundation Team Members
Samuel Rufinatscha has joined IOTA as a Software Engineer on the Ict and Bee teams, building the future core node framework of IOTA. You can follow his work on the #bee-dev channel of the IOTA Discord.
Samuel is currently studying computer science / medical informatics at the renowned Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). However he has always engaged in computer science — even as a little boy. He became competent in security and privacy by tinkering and coding during high school. Samuel has extensive knowledge of Internet security, and has a deep interest in cryptography. His background combines theoretical computer science with seven years of programming expertise.
His latest publication, “E-Voting on the Tangle” describes a cryptographic e-voting protocol based on blind signatures. Previously he introduced “MAM Lite” — a flexible messaging protocol that relies on public-key cryptography. All publications can be found on his medium account: https://medium.com/@samuel.rufinatscha
As a creative person with strong problem-solving skills, Samuel has been involved in several software projects. Notable amongst these is “Instaforce” — advertising software that aims to connect brands and people more intuitively.
Duncan is joining IOTA as a Junior Project Manager within the Projects and Partners team. In this role, he will focus on the formal aspects of project management while engaging with IOTA partners and making sure projects run smoothly from initiation to delivery.
Duncan lives in East Lothian just outside Edinburgh, Scotland, and has been working as a project manager in the manufacturing industry for the past five years. He has worked on hundreds of projects, large and small throughout the UK, Europe and Middle East and is keen to transfer his knowledge from manufacturing over to IT, to help the IOTA Foundation grow.
See also Open positions at IOTA Foundation.
Ecosystem
This tutorial will guide you through the process of setting up the XDK2MAM Dashboard, a React application that will get your XDK110 sensors data, build graphics, store them locally on datasets and handle Publish via MAM at a rate Full Nodes can do. The communication method will be HTTP and a microSD card will be used to allow controlling connection data, intervals and which sensors you want to use without the need to recompile the code to change this settings.
This tutorial will guide you through the process of getting everything working to send your XDK110 sensors data to the IOTA Data Marketplace (DMP).
AKITA Virtual Lab alpha site: M2M IOTA payments live demonstrator.
Milestone Retrospect — Untangle Care by Sebastian Fuhrhop in Pakt.Care blog.
Rumors
Twitter:
Dominik Schiener @DomSchiener on Jul 7 on African leaders launch landmark 55-nation trade zone article.
Africa is becoming the perfect testbed for new #IoT and #DLT innovations. Excited to see what #IOTA can achieve there.
Tangleblog.com @tangleblog on Jun 28:
For all the people that missed this.
“#IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology software expansion for STM32Cube”
https://www.st.com/en/embedded-software/x-cube-iota1.html …
IOTA is coming. Take a seat or get out of the way!
P.S.: Google STMicroelectronics.
Robert Lech @_robert_lech on Jun 29
Believe or not but this #iot chip is doing local or outsourced PoW for #IOTA transactions. This is huge guys! to see iota official supported by an electronics manufacturer is just fucking awesome. @ST_World @iotatoken #STM32 #IOTAstrong
Active discussions on IOTA subreddit :
How does one compete against copy-paste competitors in this space?
Coordicide: A complete re-write of the protocol?
List of industrial and institutional interest in IOTA.
Ledger, Birdz (Veolia) and IOTA working together to ensure the authenticity of drinkable water.
What do you think about this idea to use the IOTA token?
“This is about IOTA but IOTA is not mentioned”.
Can someone ELI9 why this is a big deal?
Update from Dom about the Summer Summit
Other:
Challenges and solutions for the IoT by Markus.
Part VI — AiGarth… A Distributed Artificial Intelligence by James JD Sutton.
Blockchain 5.0 — Fusing DAG ledgers with Smart Contracts by Lukas Hetzenecker.
Frames on the Tangle by Daniel Tapa.
Middleware of STM X-Cube-IOTA1 mentioned in a famous german embedded developer magazine.
Chairman of the Board at IBCS Group Comments on IOTA.
IOTA interview featured on Media Publication The Daily Chain.
IOTA Launches Trinity, a Secure and User-friendly Wallet, for Mobile and Desktop.
IOTA Ecosystem developer documentary. Send me your ~1 min video! German/English allowed!
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
IOTA community continues to grow, there is a constant increase in the number of subscribers of IOTA social media channels. However, the number of subscribers of IOTA official Telegram chats slightly decreased these weeks.
Check out Official IOTA Foundation blog.
Twitter — Official announcements channel. Average number of retweets is 50–100 for one post. Publications with 250–350 likes.
There is also a dedicated Engineering Twitter.
Facebook — Not active since 2019. 50–100 likes per publication, 5–10 shares.
Reddit — Threads with 10–30 comments, 50–100 upvotes.
IOTA Support — Subreddit for all IOTA related problems. 546
IOTA Markets — Subreddit for price speculation.
IOTA Stack Exchange — For the really tough questions.
IOTA Bitcointalk.org: since October 21st, 2015. Discussions on latest updates, price, social encounters etc.
IOTA Family website — Basic knowledge for IOTA beginners such as: what is IOTA, how is it organized, how you can contribute, where you can buy $MIOTA on a onepager website, etc.
See also and IOTA forum.
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of IOTA Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
