• The new version of IOTA GoShimmer v.0.2.0 will be released in late June and will include support for the "Parallel Reality Based Ledger State" consensus.
• In addition, the version will include a new transaction layout, the UTXO model, full conversion to binary code, and new APIs, among others.

Via a new update on the state of research, Serguei Popov, co-founder of IOTA, reported on the latest developments and advances in his field. The biggest news certainly is that the new GoShimmer is slated to release v.0.2.0 by the end of June and will provide support for the "Ledger Based Parallel State Reality" consensus.

GoShimmer is a prototype in progress of an IOTA node software which lays the foundations for Coordicide, also known as IOTA 2.0, and reaches a consensus without the coordinator, thus completely decentralizing the IOTA network. "Parallel Reality", also known as "Tangle Multiverse", is a brand new consensus model, which is supposed to make IOTA 2.0 much safer, resilient and efficient.

A few days ago, Hans Moog announced via Twitter that the first testnet “Parallel Reality Based Ledger State” was nearing completion. According to Moog's announcement, only the encoding of a library is necessary to interact with the nodes and the network. As communicated by Popov, the release is scheduled for the end of June.

As Popov explained, "parallel reality" will be one of the main topics for future research:

The team has completed the implementation and testing of the state of the parallel reality based registry which will be part of the next version of GoShimmer in its branch based form. We believe that this new concept for managing the general ledger state will suit our decentralized network very well and will be one of the main subjects to be evaluated after the new version.

The new version of GoShimmer will also include many other new features, marking an important milestone for Coordicide, as Popov describes:

We see this release as an important step, as it will support value transactions and dispute resolution via FPC for the first time. It will also include updates such as a different transaction layout, UTXO, support for "parallel reality", binary ledger states (encoding, cryptographic signatures and hash functions), new APIs and more again.

Continued development progress for the IOTA coordicide

Last month, the Popov team also worked on a new API to provide value transactions and recover the balance of a particular address, which will form the core of a new "very simple" wallet. In addition, the complete conversion of the code to binary is complete, leading to the development of a new "proof of work library (PoW) configurable, which will pass to our adaptive PoW in future and iterative versions".

As Popov points out, one of the works recently focused on unit and integration tests. Otherwise, the objective of the research team moves more and more, because the specifications are almost complete:

With the specifications nearing completion, the first phase of this group's project is nearing completion. We hope to start focusing on writing our results and finding the best metrics.

With this in mind, the team published two new articles on FPC and the integration of Mana, which will be presented at the Futures Technologies conference (FTC2020) in Vancouver, Canada, from November 5 to 6. In addition, two articles on networking have been submitted and a new document on dRNG is still in preparation.