IOTA Foundation Announces Plans to Remove Centralized “Coordinator”

in #news5 years ago

 

Last Tuesday (Nov 20th), the IOTA foundation published the first of a series of articles explaining the plans in motion to gradually remove the Coordinator from the IOTA network. The IOTA research team also scheduled an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit. They will be answering pre-submitted questions on the comments today (Nov 26th), from 5pm to 6pm CET. 

IOTA Coordinator Explained

IOTA is a different kind of  cryptocurrency. IOTA’s network, the Tangle, was not built using  blockchain technology. The Tangle is a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph),  another kind of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). As the experimential technology  that it is, the Tangle’s Coordinator works as a sort of training wheels  for the platform. The Tangle is designed to become more efficient and  secure as the number of participants on the network increases. The IOTA  foundation therefore must make sure the network is strong enough to  resist potential attacks before removing the Coordinator. 

IOTA Decentralization

Perhaps one of the most  criticized characteristics of the IOTA project is that it is overly  centralized, as the Coordinators are controlled by the IOTA foundation.  Although this gives the foundation a certain degree of control over the  network, the Coordinator is used to confirm transactions and prevent bad  actors from acquiring enough hash power to exploit double spending or  network splits. It’s important to note that, unlike EOS, the IOTA foundation is unable to change transaction history or revert transactions. While the Coordinator is still  serving an important role for the network, its removal will be a major  milestone towards the decentralization and scalability of the Tangle. 

In the last article  of the “Coordicide” series, the IOTA foundation announced the release  of an open source version of the Coordinator. This new version has been  used in public testnets and the team hopes to have it deployed on the  mainnet in the next six months. The announcement above may be an  indication that the “Coordicide” might still be a long way away. The  IOTA team didn't give an estimated time, stating that there is no rush  as the Coordinator must be removed safely:    

“The short answer is that the Coordinator can and will be removed  when our research team is satisfied that we understand the  coordinator-free Tangle sufficiently.”

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