The IOTA Foundation and Shimmer teams have been working diligently on various aspects of their respective projects to enhance functionality, research new possibilities, and engage with the community.
These advancements and collaborations demonstrate “the commitment of the IOTA ecosystem to drive innovation, foster community engagement, and contribute to the growth of distributed ledger technology.”
Shimmer Updates
This quarter, the main highlight for Shimmer was “the successful launch of the ShimmerEVM Testnet, accompanied by the Treasures of Shimmer Testnet campaign.” Additionally, crucial propositions for governance “were voted on, paving the way for the network.”
Since the launch of the ShimmerEVM Testnet on March 29th, there “have been no major issues or necessary resets.” Since then, it has reportedly “processed over 3 million blocks and 15 million transactions, with a peak of 1.8 million transactions in a single day, all with an average block time of around 800 milliseconds.”
The Treasures of Shimmer campaign by TEA “contributed significantly to the testnet activity. It attracted a high level of participation, resulting in 10 million transactions.” This surge was fueled by 16 projects “competing for a share of the 1.8 million $SMR token bounty, which has been paid out.”
Efforts are focused on “integrating feedback from the campaign into finalizing improvements for launching ShimmerEVM on Shimmer.”
Shimmer Governance and Vote
Over 98% of the community supported “the establishment of two independent committees to manage funds and promote the growth of the Shimmer ecosystem: the Shimmer Community Treasury Grant Committee and the Shimmer Growth Committee.”
The Shimmer Community Grant Committee has “reviewed over 40 grant proposals, approving more than $300,000 in grants for our ecosystem builders.” The recently-created Shimmer Growth Committee has also “facilitated partnerships and funded vital infrastructure projects for the upcoming ShimmerEVM launch.”
In addition, the Governance group is “preparing governance processes for the ShimmerEVM, utilizing EVM Smart Contracts.” Public community governance meetings are “held every Thursday at 4 pm CEST on Discord; recordings of these meetings can be found in our YouTube playlist.”
IOTA Foundation Updates
The IOTA Foundation‘s Research and Engineering departments continued to develop the protocol, “while our UX, Touchpoint and Governance teams created more robust ties with our community.”
Meanwhile, their Regulatory Affairs, Social Impact, and Sustainability teams have been busy providing “a voice for the DLT, blockchain and crypto industry in answer to the latest regulations.”
IOTA Core Node Research
GoShimmer functionality has been “transferred to a new node software called iota-core by the Core Node Research team, which is responsible for advancing the IOTA protocol.”
They made adjustments to confirmation flags and the fork-choice rule “based on guidance from the Finalization Research Working Group.” They’re also testing “an initial implementation of an Account-based ledger for tracking Mana.”
Currently, the team is working on “enabling staking and delegation of IOTA tokens to validators, implementing Mana calculations and Mana decay for a complete dPoS system.”
This work incorporates input from the Incentive Taskforce, “responsible for developing the new incentive mechanisms and researching game-theoretical and tokenomics-related subjects.”
Additionally, the team is developing “the IOTA Congestion Control Algorithm (ICCA), a modified congestion control mechanism centered around accounts for protocol usability and accountability.”
Users’ Mana balance associated with their accounts ensures their fair share of the network, while consensus “utilizes weight derived from accounts.” The Finalization Research Working Group (responsible for “developing the consensus mechanism in the protocol) is investigating the specifics of epochs, committee selection, and rotation.”
IOTA Protocol Research
Parameter setting and user experience details for the protocol are being finalized by the Protocol Research team, which is “responsible for the design of the fundamental modules in IOTA 2.0.”
It is also working with engineers and researchers “to support the development of the IOTA Core node software.”
Two research papers were successfully presented at IEEE ICBC in Dubai in May: “Mitigation of liveness attacks in DAG-based ledgers”, accessible here, and “TangleSim: An Agent-based, Modular Simulator for DAG-based Distributed Ledger Technologies”, available here.
The team is also helping “organize Beyond the Chains: Workshop on DAG-based DLTs, which will be held in conjunction with the International Congress on Blockchain and Applications in Portugal on 12 and 14 July.”
IOTA Ledger Research
Focusing on the functionality of our data and application layers, the Ledger Research team “has made significant improvements to various components of the IOTA ledger, including:”
The Programmability Working Group, which is tasked with analyzing the feasibility of having programmability support on IOTA Layer 1, “has been investigating the implications of deterministic program execution on UTXO-based blockchains.”
The Tangle Dynamics Working Group, responsible “for studying the structural properties of the Tangle and its relation to the other components and performance properties of our protocol, has had two of their research papers accepted for presentation at this year’s International Congress on Blockchain and Applications.” These soon-to-be-available papers contribute valuable insights “into fairness in DAG-based DLTs.”
The Working Group’s presentation “about DAG-based DLTs was positively received at the UZH Blockchain Lecture Note Series in April.”
An academic partner, IMT Brest, has recently “appointed a dedicated Postdoctoral Researcher focused on studying the theoretical aspects of Tangle dynamics: The Working Group always welcomes academic collaborations to further their research.”
The Finalization Research Working Group, “responsible for developing the consensus mechanism in the protocol, made progress in implementing the confirmation and finality gadget, as well as the Slot Commitment Chain switching rule.”
These developments have “transformed theoretical conditions (which were designed in the previous months) into practical applications.” The Working Group has also “demonstrated security guarantees for the confirmation and finalization flags under the synchronous and asynchronous network models, which enables the team to confidently proceed with implementation and utilize real-world scenarios.”
Moreover, the group has elaborated “on the technical details of the committee selection procedure to ensure a smooth rotation of validator committees.”
The Congestion Control Working Group, “responsible for designing the access scheme for the protocol, has finalized its proposal based on a Mana burn filter and a round-robin scheduler.”
The group is currently “working on documentation and facilitating implementation. Additionally, algorithm parameters are being set up with the help of the TangleSim simulator.”
Finally, the journal paper “Improving Quality of Service for Users of Leaderless DAG-based Distributed Ledgers” has been “accepted for publication in the Association of Computing Machinery’s Distributed Ledger Technology journal.”
The IOTA developers concluded:
“This quarter has been filled with significant milestones and achievements for the IOTA ecosystem. The successful launch of the ShimmerEVM Testnet and the engaging Treasures of Shimmer campaign showcased the network’s capabilities and garnered engaged participation. Furthermore, crucial progress has been made in governance, research, and engineering, solidifying the foundation for future advancements. With a thriving community and dedicated teams, the IOTA ecosystem is poised for continued growth and innovation in the coming months. Exciting times lie ahead.”
For more details on this update, click here.
