• The IOTA 2.0 architecture brings linearity to the voting mechanism ensuring that nodes with higher approval weight get to execute the transactions.
• The IOTA community is eagerly waiting for the launch of IOTA 2.0 which shall happen by the second half of 2023.

As the IOTA Foundation team actively works on new developments in IOTA 2.0, Dr. Bing-Yang Lin, Senior Software Engineer recently shared some initial research results while testing the robustness of the IOTA 2.0 consensus mechanism.

The IOTA 2.0 architecture seeks to significantly enhance the performance of the IOTA blockchain by offering better scalability, better security, as well as greater decentralization. Apart from this, IOTA 2.0 seeks to be a permissionless blockchain allowing everyone to join the platform.

Thus, it seeks to create a level playing field for both the small and the big players with no minimum staking requirements. The IOTA 2.0 architecture seeks to provide scalability to the tune of 10,000 nodes and 1000 mps, thus making it suitable for sharding solutions. However, to understand the significant transformational change that IOTA 2.0 brings, it is important to understand the challenges within the existing IOTA ecosystem.

Dr. Bing-Yang Lin, Senior Software Engineer at the #IOTA Foundation, just presented some first research results on the robustness of the IOTA 2.0 consensus mechanism! 👀

Non-technical summary below! 👇🧵 pic.twitter.com/C3fTX7SDa2

— IOTA Penguin ✨ (@iota_penguin) March 15, 2023

Challenges for IOTA network

As we know, the existing IOTA network leverages the Tangle technology which is nothing but a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). In the DAG structure, users can play the role of both miners as well as creators of the transaction.

Although the underlying UXTO of IOTA is DAG, this structure has other benefits as well such as transaction efficiency, flexibility to adapt to higher throughput, small blocks that allow the validity of single transactions, and others. While other traditional blockchain platforms face the issue of scalability, the IOTA network handles it with ease.

However, there are some challenges with using the Tangle technology such as non-linearity or only partial ordering of transactions. Other challenges with the Tangle are practicability as well as Sybil protection.

The IOTA network offers Sybil protection through node weights wherein each node carries the weight as voting power. This is inherited through the issued blocks leading to a weighted Tangle. The Approval resembles the number of nodes that agree that a transaction is valid. However, the finalization blocks are only confirmed once the approval weight reaches a confirmation threshold.

IOTA 2.0 voting mechanism

The IOTA 2.0 has a more robust voting mechanism wherein the nodes vote indirectly for a branch by attaching their transactions to it. In this case, the honest nodes will attach their transaction to the nodes that they see as the first or the branch with the most approval weight among multiple branches.

However, if the nodes notice that some other branch has more approval weight than the branch they voted on, the nodes then attach the new transaction to the new branch and their approval weight will be subtracted from the previous branch. When the approval weight of a branch is more than 66 percent ahead of any conflicting branch, this branch is considered valid. This helps to ensure balance by ensuring that branches with higher approval weights get the transactions.

Thus, IOTA 2.0 helps to attain better confirmation times of 1-2 seconds, and is resistant to other bait-and-switch attacks, while delivering robust performance in a challenging environment.