IOTA Leaps Into Decentralization, Abandoning the Coordinator system, Introducing Znet and Much More

IOTA has announced the launch of Znet. It is the first ever iteration testament that does not involve coordinator. This platform surfaced a few backs ago, but only recently it has been made available to the general community participation, contribution, and involvement. It is coordination less IRI system, shortened as ‘Coo- less IRI.’

The main purpose of Coo- less IRI is to offer a platform where one can test the functioning of the OPTA network. The company looks at this as a fundamental step that will enable the team to clearly understand the vulnerabilities that might arise in the Coo- less main- net.

Why to “kill Coo”?

The reason behind IOTA’s release of a testbed which is coordinator free is that the company wants to move towards decentralization. Since last year the Foundation has been talking about its plans to remove coordinator From IOTA network. For your reference in November last year, IOTA Foundation explained why it wants to “kill Coo’ away. Here is an excerpt from the announcement from Medium.com-

“If Coo is so nice, why kill it?

There are several reasons why it is undesirable for Coo to stay around forever:

• In theory, it allows the Foundation to choose which transactions receive priority.
• In theory, it allows the Foundation to freeze funds, by having milestones ignore transactions that spend them.
• It is a single point of attack: if for some reason Coo stops working or is taken over, confirmations in the network would halt.
• Coo has so far been a limiting factor for the scalability of the network.”

In order to maintain security, preventing the double spends, IOTA has been using the Coordinator as a temporary consensus mechanism. It was used since the network did not have enough hashing power to offer deep safety.

Another reason that is behind the killing of Coo or the “Coordicide” is the fact that it is a single point of attack and restricts the scalability. Also, it gives the Foundation the room to prioritize the transactions and freedom to halt the funds.

What does IOTA aiming at by improving on IRI-

In the fourth part of the announcement article, IOTO explained its vision behind improving the IRI, in its ‘Coordinator VS IRI’ section. Here is an excerpt-

“Ideally, we would like to see:

• A minimum of 3 months with no major bugs reported or incidents affecting the network;

• A consistently healthy Tangle under normal operating conditions;

• A thorough code audit by security experts.”

The drop of Coo and the adoption of Znet-

Earlier every transaction came with the Coo putting out a milestone. It is basically like a signed stamp of confirmation by IOTA Foundation. Removing the Coo will, of course, result in the removal of these milestones. It also brings it back to starting point selection, Ledger state calculation, and, Node synchronization, as per the reports from bitcoinexchangeguide.com.

This removal will put the validation power in the hands of the users. Therefore, as long as they meet the requirements of PoW, they are good to go. This version will work on a new test- net called- Znet. ‘z’ stands for ‘zero value.’ In order to make it fully functional and effective, the team is working on making the code more stable, build the resilience and putting together more details on the effectiveness of it by far.

If all of the efforts land up successfully, it will be both the community and the IOTA Foundation closer. The Foundation is targeting to work together on many test- nets and other activities that involve the community, said Dom Schiener. He also added that this initiative helped in creating the protocol.

The new developments are making the community excited. One of the community members shared the following opinion on the Reddit platform-

“Indeed, glad they are not just throwing something out there. People that were expecting a thing to happen throughout one year has left this subreddit (and that makes me glad). Also really glad that they improved their communication skills with the community. We can now follow even the smallest steps of the development, which is awesome!”

For in-depth information on IOTA’s plans and new moves, you can refer to the four-part article on Medium.com, which covers a lot of topics such as-

“Node accountability, Improvements to the Tip Selection Algorithm, Coordinator vs. IRI, How can we enforce MCMC?” and so on.