The IOTA Foundation announced the launch of a “DevNet” (Developer Network) called Nectar, which will be the second preparatory phase for the rollout of the IOTA 2.0 Update.
The developers said that the Nectar phase will play a key role in preparation for the final launch of IOTA 2.0, which is due to take place in late 2021. The move into the Nectar phase came after the rollout of the Chrysalis update to the IOTA mainnet and the launch of the Pollen testnet in June 2020. Nectar will lay the groundwork for the transition to Tangle’s fully decentralized censorship-free and commission-free technology.
One of the main elements of Nectar is the lack of a centralized Coordinator to allow developers to oversee the network. This legacy system will be replaced by the decentralized Coordicide protocol, also known as IOTA 2.0.
In February 2020, hackers attacked the IOTA Trinity wallet, stealing $ 2 million worth of coins. This caused a network downtime that lasted almost a month. After the hacker attack, IOTA accelerated the planned transition to full decentralization. According to the Iota Foundation, at the Nectar stage, validation will be carried out in a decentralized manner, and the nodes will receive rewards. It can be viewed as a payment for “honest behavior” that builds a good reputation and provides enhanced capabilities.
Apart from free transactions and full decentralization, another important feature of Nectar is the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFT), instrumental tokens and tokenized assets on the IOTA network. In addition, Nectar has a modular architecture with which developers can patch sandboxed modules.
“The Nectar Testnet for IOTA 2.0 marks an important milestone on the road to full decentralization. This proves that free, scalable, secure and fully decentralized distributed ledger technology (DLT) really exists. We will continue to prepare for the implementation of the Coordicide protocol, ”said Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chairman of the IOTA Foundation.
Recall that in March, the IOTA developers presented the alpha version of the IOTA Smart Contracts Protocol (ISCP) platform, which allows testing smart contracts.
