IOTA Releases Industry-Ready Version of Chronicle, a Decentralized Storage Framework
On July 10, IOTA (MIOTA) announced their official permanode solution dubbed Chronicle is now in Alpha. Chronicle was released by the IOTA Foundation in September last year with an aim to store all IOTA transactions, forever.
Addressing a Key Issue
IOTA, a permissionless trust layer for the Internet of Things (IoT) introduced the Chronicle in September last year as a solution for enterprises and organizations to store transaction data for long periods of time.
To give some background, node owners in the IOTA network are free to remove old transaction data whenever they like. For this reason, the IOTA Foundation introduced local snapshots to enable node owners to delete old transactions and keep their Tangle database small.
While the option to delete old data bodes well for node owners, it is not particularly viable for regular users who might need to query the Tangle for old transactions.
For instance, consider a situation where Bob shares a decentralized identity document (DID) with a government requesting a driving license. Later, when the government officials try to access the DID on the Tangle, it might so happen that they don’t find it in the database, thereby denying Bob’s request for the license.
Chronicle is IOTA’s silver bullet for such memory problems as it makes it easy for all to store all IOTA transactions in a fast, secure, scalable, and distributed database. Specifically, Chronicle allows users to store all transactions off the Tangle in a separate distributed database, making them available for however long they are needed.
A New Chronicle
Since its September 2019 release, Chronicle has undergone continual improvements to develop into an industry-ready solution for widespread adoption.
Chronicle has been ported from the Erlang programming language to Rust to provide it a more secure programming environment and to enable interoperability with future IOTA projects.
The new version of Chronicle also makes setting up a permanode just a matter of a few minutes, courtesy of the CLI application it comes with.
Further, it also provides increased flexibility to users, allowing them to customize the framework of the solution as per their requirements, including being able to change the duration to store transactions for, the storage solution to use, and the type of data to store.
The future releases of Chronicle will focus on including a web dashboard and a method for Chronicle to solidify transactions, the announcement concluded.
