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 tokens as rewards.

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.