Surely one of the things that most interests us in these days of IOTA is to know about the advances regarding the development of its technology and the strategic alliances of the Foundation. As we are used to through the IOTA blog we were able to read and see what the latest news was regarding the first topic mentioned.
This past February 21th, was held in Barcelona the IOTA Reseach Summit in which 18 of the members of this team participated. This particular team has the IOTA Research Council which was created at the end of 2018 in order to bring together the best researchers with experience in different fields to oversee the work of the hole team of experienced researchers.
In this article we will review some of the main topics discussed at this event. Read it to the end!.
Gabriela Jara
Content Coordinator & Writer
IOTA Hispano
This IOTA Research Team team is divided into different departments which are specifically in charge of certain aspects. Each team has a leader and the whole department is oversee by the IOTA Research Council, created at the end of last year more precisely in November. The IRC set the strategic technological direction, provide academic oversight to IOTA research, assess and grant funding to academic partners, and oversee collaboration with academia and other research organizations. The team of researchers that IOTA has is one of the largest within any DLT.
Many interesting topics arose from the questions left by some IOTA Reddit users to be answered by this panel of researchers in which they were Hans Moog, Serguei Popov, Wolfgang Welz, Bartosz Kusmierz and Moody Alam.
Two of the main topics that have been worked on by this team of professionals were Coordicide and attack analysis. Some of the people in charge of different areas of research revealed the situation in which they find themselves in the midst of the investigations that are being carried out.
- Bartosz Kusmierz is project owner of attack analysis, in a few words his team is in charge of making sure that nobody succesfully atack de Tangle. With respect to the attacks there are two on which they put more focus, one is the parasite chain attack in which progress is 50% and in the other hand splitting attack in which progress is below 50%, but Bart didn’t reveal much more about it.
- Wolfgang Welz project owner of the Coordicide, made a review of the work being done with coordicide. It is a project with several edges and at the summit he made a brief review of each one.
The first one he mentioned is the Node Accountabilty. The basic principle of node accountability is to classify transactions as good or bad (typical examples of bad behaviour include double-spending attempts or a very large number of re-attachments). The idea was to create a reputation system, similar to object reputation systems used for peer-to-peer file-sharing. The reputation system would be conceptually similar to page-ranking algorithms, but much simpler and adapted to the needs of the IOTA ecosystem. (read more)
Another one is where to start the Random Walk in the Coordinator.
Remember that the team was conducting both theoretical and practical experiments to find starting points for the MCMC random walk. Having several positive results. And they were able to create a large-scale simulation that would allow them to find some observable parameters of the transactions in the Tangle, and some parameters that are not so easily observable, such as the probability of exit-similarity.
He also mentioned spam and rate control and CLIRI which is a project available in the repository, CLIRI is a «kind of white paper that talks about current reference implementation. This return us in some way to the roots of the withe paper that leads us to the famous mechanism of consensus. The withe paper explains us a very interesting way of consensus but we are also exploring other alternatives like local modifiers or to use some fast probabilistic consensus mechanism» said Welz.
- Hans Moog who implemented de local snaptshots feature is working also in the cordicide, and reusable adresses (A Proposal for Reusable Adress). Moog commented that this was a special topic discussed within the summit as it has certain implications for the approach they will take with respect to Coordinator and the processing of transactions. All this will bring a great upgrade.
Moog also answered a question which referred to whether Qubic somehow resembled Ethereum’s smart contracts, he said that not much could be said about this project but that it was very far from the Ethereum smart contracts because its structure is different from anything seen in other crypto projects. «Qubic can use a low level language like ABRA which will allow them to be used in FPGA devices and others which will make possible to build more abstract layers on top». He also said that there is still a lot of work to be done on this project, but they are not trying to compete with something that is already done.
Some questions as to whether IOTA was working on something TOP SECRET also came up in Reddit. Moody said:
One of the main characteristics of the foundation is to publish all the researches that are done, so there is nothing TOP SECRET going on.
Of course, investigations that do not yet take a definite course are kept indoors until everything is resolved and the research work is completed. Nothing secret happens behind the IF, everything that has been studied is published, every controversy that has been presented has been debated, every question that has arisen in the community has been answered.
This summit undoubtedly served for this team, which generally works remotely, to discuss some of the most important issues that IOTA is working on. It was a week in which the different departments were able to exchange ideas and move forward on many important topics. Undoubtedly there is still much to do in IOTA, but we can’t say that this great team of experts, passionate about what their work, are doing their best to resolve all these issues addressed in this article.
View the hole video of the IOTA Research Team, there is no waste:
