IOTA Introduce Pollen, Nectar, and Honey Phases Ahead of Coordinator-Less Mainnet

IOTA today introduced three phases of IOTA 2.0 – Pollen, Nectar, and Honey – to mark the project’s journey toward the permanent removal of the centralized coordinator node to transform IOTA into a truly decentralized, scalable, and feeless network.

Introducing Pollen, Nectar, and Honey

IOTA, a German distributed ledger technology (DLT) project focused on developing robust Internet of Things (IoT) solutions today introduced three phases of IOTA 2.0 that will reflect important milestones and testnet releases leading up to Coordicide – the event that eliminates the centralized Coordinator from the IOTA ecosystem.

The three phases introduced by IOTA are namely: Pollen, Nectar, and Honey.

Roadmap to IOTA 2.0

According to the blog post, Pollen will be the first official testnet of the IOTA 2.0 network. This phase would set the foundation for the first functional coordinator-less network for IOTA post the removal of the Coordinator. Accordingly, iterative improvements will develop Pollen into the final, feature-complete release candidate for IOTA 2.0.

Notably, the Pollen network will also function as the research testbed for the IOTA Foundation, community, and external researchers to validate concepts from the Coordicide white papers and simulate certain attack vectors.

Following the successful release of the Pollen network, the Nectar network would launch in the second half of 2020.

Nectar will be a full implementation of IOTA’s Coordicide modules on an incentivized testnet. The Nectar network will essentially be concerned with testing for any bugs or issues on the network that need to be corrected before the final release of the mainnet.

As its name might suggest, Nectar will incentivize participants with rewards for finding bugs and attack vectors on the network.

Finally, Honey would be the final release candidate for IOTA 2.0. This network will comprise all the modules per the final specification of the Coordicide and can, in fact, be considered IOTA’s first version of a fully decentralized mainnet.

With regard to Honey, the blog post reads:

“At this point, the network will have been battle-tested and secured through many hundreds of hours of testing with full audits of our node software.”

In related news, BTCManager reported on June 26, 2020, that IOTA expects to launch the first public Coordicide testnet by the end of this month.