Iota 2.0 ‘Nectar’ DevNet goes live to achieve full decentralization

The roadmap to Iota 2.0 has reached another milestone as the Iota Foundation launches the Nectar DevNet.

In a blog post published on Wednesday, the Iota developer announced the news of the Nectar DevNet launch, which forms an essential part of the preparatory work for the release of Iota 2.0 slated for late 2021.

The Nectar DevNet follows on the heels of the Chrysalis upgrade and is an expansion of the Pollen Testnet released back in June 2020. The Iota 2.0 DevNet sets the stage for the transition to a feeless, permissionless and fully decentralized Tangle network.

According to the announcement, the absence of a centralized coordinator is one of the major elements of the Nectar DevNet. Indeed, in Iota 2.0, the legacy Coordinator system will be replaced by a decentralized Coordicide.

Back in February 2020, hackers attacked Trinity — Iota’s native wallet — stealing about $2 million and causing a network downtime that lasted almost a month to prevent further damage from the attack.

Since the Trinity wallet hack, Iota has moved forward with its planned transition to full decentralization and the emergence of an incentivized Coordicide. According to the release, the Iota Foundation revealed that Nectar will rely on network consensus validation with honest nodes earning “mana” as rewards.

Commenting on how mana will incentivize adoption, William Sanders, director of research at the Iota Foundation, told Cointelegraph:

“Incentive to participate arises from the demand to use the network. Users who want to use our DApps, spend our tokens, or secure data on the Tangle, have a natural incentive to acquire mana to use the Tangle. Mana is not a token since it cannot be traded, and its value will be always [be] dependent on the demand for access to the network.”

Apart from feeless transactions and complete decentralization, tokenization capability is another major feature of the Nectar Iota 2.0 DevNet. The research prototype offers the first opportunities for creating digital assets like utility “coins” and nonfungible tokens on the Iota network.

Nectar also comes with a modular architecture allowing developers to implement specific bug fixes and updates on isolated modules.

Commenting on the Nectar DevNet release, Iota Foundation co-founder Dominik Schiener called the Iota 2.0 research prototype a “game-changer.” According to Schiener, the Iota developers are eager to receive useful feedback on Nectar’s capabilities in preparation for the main Coordicide update.

Back in March, Iota released the Alpha version of its smart contract protocol to enable trustless cross-chain transfers. Indeed, cross-chain interoperability is becoming a major focal point in the blockchain ecosystem.

Commenting on Iota’s plans in this emerging cross-chain landscape, Schiener told Cointelegraph: “We are very excited about this cross-chain future, and we are confident that the native security and feeless transfers of tokenized assets on Iota, combined with our smart contract protocol, will offer powerful building blocks for DApp developers.”