A new version of the IOTA Pollen testnet is live. IOTA Foundation published the latest details about the newest version. Pollen testnet v0.5.5 consists of multiple changes and upgrades. One of the biggest news about the latest version is that Mana use-cases inside Pollen are now more.
IOTA integrated two more modules in Mana that improves the use case of the testnet. Other modules will be added soon to the testnet. In short, the IOTA team plans to integrate as many Coordicide modules to Pollen to fully test it with the features of IOTA’s next-version blockchain.
Testnet Getting Ready for Maturity
Testnets are vital components in blockchain projects. Development teams launch them to test the upcoming features of a blockchain and receive feedback from the development and the end-user community. IOTA is on the road to a very significant milestone. The blockchain will be completely different with support for smart contracts and many more features.
Pollen is one of the essential testnets in the path toward the next-version IOTA. IOTA team adds Corrdicide features gradually to the testnet to analyze every aspect before launching the final mainnet. The newest version of Pollen consists of numerous changes that make the testnet very similar to the final vision.
Pollen testnet v0.5.5 integrates two Coordicide modules named consensus and autopeering in Mana. IOTA added Mana to Pollen a couple of weeks ago and is now completing it with various Coordicide modules. In simple terms, the testnet is getting ready for the Nectar stage, which is another essential step toward a fully decentralized IOTA.
There are many changes in the latest version of the Pollen testnet. Although the most important ones are about Mana and integrations, other things make this testnet a reliable environment. IOTA says many Fast Probabilistic Consensus (FPC) optimizations are added in Pollen. According to the release note:
“The Fast Probabilistic Consensus (FPC) protocol is used as part of the consensus mechanism in the Coordicide solution, and you can find a more detailed description in the FPC blogpost. So far, this consensus module has equally treated the opinions of every node. However, this offers no protection against Sybil attacks, where adversaries run hundreds or even thousands of nodes to disrupt the consensus. With the integration of Mana instead, nodes will form their quorum by selecting nodes to be queried proportionally to their Mana.”
As mentioned before, more modules will be integrated into Pollen in the short term. According to IOTA, Congestion control, Finality (approval weight), Reorg, and dRNG will be integrated soon. The final steps are the introduction of Snapshots and Timestamp voting in Pollen. After that, the testnet will go to the Nectar stage and get ready to launch publicly.
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