IOTA 2.0 Makes Strides: Stardust-VM Implementation, and Testing in Full Swing – Exciting Progress on the Horizon

The IOTA Foundation has been working on the launch of the IOTA 2.0 infrastructure ahead this year with the team continuing to make some progress in line. Over the last week, the IOTA team conducted changes to the GoShimmer repository along with big steps on the IOTA core implementation.

Although there have been reports that GoShimmer has been abandoned, the last week saw some minor changes around a specific test case. IOTA’s Research Engineer Jonas Theis said that the team will continue testing things on GoShimmer before they are available on IOTA Core.

Currently, all the changes made have a major focus on the progress done with IOTACore implementation. But these changes are super minor and show no hint of any progress toward the release of the GoShimmer MVP.

Key Focus Areas and Activities for IOTAcore Implementation

IOTA’s Research Engineer Jonas Theis recently stated that the key focus will be on IOTAcore. He mentioned about a few parallel efforts in this direction:

1. The IOTA team has rewritten the Mempool entirely to operate in memory only. As of now, there’s no support for conflicts but remains the next major thing in priority. The Mempool, a reality-based ledger, is undergoing adjustments to align with the “in-memory paradigm.” This paradigm has recently shown significant performance enhancements for the ConflictDAG in GoShimmer. This change is specific to IOTAcore and cannot be simply ported from GoShimmer.
2. Accounts and mana: The IOTA team is modifying iota.go to support accounts on the UXTO level as well as integrating commitments to accounts/mana into IOTAcore. At the same time, the UXTO changes have been written down for an updated TIP.
3. APIs: The IOTA team is coming up with the core APIs and will be implementing some of the existing APIs. The team is currently in the process of defining the core API and incorporating some of the existing APIs. The client team is actively collaborating and offering feedback to ensure alignment in the development efforts.
4. Furthermore, the team is bringing together Stardust VM, mempool, and conflictdag. The team is working on this right now and will allow them to issue a stardust transaction within IOTAcore.

In summary, the IOTAcore team has achieved progress in the following:

• Mempool & StardustVM is merged.
• LedgerState from Hornet is merged.
• Integrate ConflictDAG is merged.