Just a few weeks after IOTA introduced Mana in its testnet platform, the blockchain project has enhanced its trials by releasing a newer version of the Pollen testnet. It will be integrated into two Coordicide modules, which should serve as a major step towards achieving complete decentralization.
- In a recent blog post, IOTA announced the release of Pollen v0.5.5, introducing several changes to its network. Most of them are concentrated towards the Coordicide modules, namely consensus (Fast Probabilistic Consensus – FPC) and autopeering.
- The FPC protocol is typically used as part of the consensus mechanism in the Coordicide solution. The current versions failed to provide sufficient protection against Sybil attacks, but the integration of Mana will address this.
- Nodes will be able to form their quorum by selecting nodes to be queried proportionally to their Mana. The post called it the “first significant step to test our Mana system as a Sybil protection and reputation system in a testnet environment.”
- Mana will also be employed in autopeering, which should ensure that the network is safe against Eclipse attacks. To prevent such threats, the process would enable the creation of arbitrary nodes, but there would be a limit as to how many nodes can be established with a certain amount of Mana. This should make it “prohibitively difficult for an attacker to produce a lot of high Mana nodes.”
- The statement also outlined the following steps in Mana’s development on the network, including integration with Congestion control, Finality, Reorg, and dRNG. Additionally, the blockchain project will also introduce Snapshots and Timestamp voting shortly prior to releasing Nectar.
- IOTA has been relatively active in recent weeks with new developments, trying to distinguish the current state from some past mistakes. One of them was integration on the Binance Smart Chain, which allows users to stake, yield, and earn from more applications.