- While a concrete date for Chrysalis phase 2 is still pending, it became known that the IOTA Foundation has an internal testnet running.
- Work on the Hornet node software for phase 2 is nearing completion.
After there was a new headline about IOTA almost every day in October, things have become a little quieter around the IOTA Foundation (IF) in November so far. Currently, the development of Chrysalis phase 2 seems to be the focus of the IF. While phase 1 was launched on mainnet in August, the release of phase 2 is planned by the end of the year.
As Jakub Cech, Technical Director of the IOTA Foundation stated in late September, the upgrade will be the largest “network upgrade in IOTA’s history and will affect every part of the IOTA ecosystem”. Chrysalis phase 2 will introduce many new components and replace parts of the existing technical design. Among other things, the UTXO model, the complete conversion to binary code, the atomic transactions, and support for the Ed25519 signature scheme are introduced in order to reuse addresses.
IOTA hornet developer Maximilian Hase (aka muXxer) has now revealed the current progress of Chrysalis phase 2 via Discord. In view of the assumption that a private testnet is already active on the part of the IOTA Foundation, a user asked the developer whether a release of phase 2 can be expected this week. The answer from Hase at least revealed that there is an internal testnet.
It will take more time than this week, since it is not only related to the full node development. All IOTA parts have to be switched to the new system at the same time. All client libs, wallets, explorers, full nodes, exchange implementations, etc.
So this is not in our hand, the only thing we can do is pushing forward with the hornet development. If you want to see what we are working on, follow the hornet repo on github. But yes, an internal testnet is running.
The Hornet developer also revealed that his responsibility, the Hornet node software, is almost complete. As Hase explained, currently only a code refactoring is being done:
I can only talk about hornet and with hornet not much is missing, we are refactoring to make things cleaner right now.
