IOTA unveils first testnet of fully decentralized network Pollen

Open-source blockchain firm IOTA has announced the next iteration of its testnet for a fully decentralised network, dubbed Pollen.

The release enables developers and enthusiasts to test the capabilities of a fully decentralised network for the first time. Pollen is a rapidly developing research testbed where the community, researchers and developers can test and validate the concepts of IOTA 2.0, which will serve as the company’s Coordinator-free network.

Components of IOTA 2.0 will be released in three phases with Pollen as the first of these phases. Phase two will include the next major release, called Nectar, where the remaining components will be released onto the IOTA 2.0 incentivised test network, and rewards will be distributed to node operators/attackers to test the resilience of the protocol.

In Nectar, IOTA will work to finalise the node software until it is ready to be an official release candidate for the mainnet. The final milestone (phase three), known as Honey, will be the official release of IOTA 2.0 and the first fully decentralised version of IOTA on the mainnet, and will be the production-ready version of the protocol.

Earlier this month Coin Rivet reported on IOTA’s release of the Hornet Node Software, which reportedly increased transaction fees by up to 20x.

The latest release will provide support for features like tokenisation, scalable smart contracts, dApps and sharding.

Jakub Cech, Director of Engineering at IOTA, said: “The community has always been an important part of IOTA’s development. With this release, we look forward to allowing our research and developer community, along with others to test out and validate the Coordicide components.

“We look forward to continuing to build the future of the IOTA protocol together with the community and our academic partners towards its production-readiness.”

The series of upgrades come after a difficult start to the year for the company with hackers infiltrating the network to steal millions of tokens, prompting the entire network to be temporarily taken offline.

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