The IOTA project announced today the release of Pollen, a decentralized testnet that marks the first phase toward the launch of the widely anticipated, IOTA 2.0.
The Pollen testnet is now open to participation from researchers and engineers and will champion the core IOTA objective, which is building a truly decentralized, fee-less distributed ledger that is ready for the Internet of things (IoT) and enterprise adoption.
Among other things, Pollen brings several features to IOTA, including a new consensus algorithm dubbed, “Fast Probabilistic Consensus,” value transactions, a metric monitoring tool for node operators, and the possibility of building feeless decentralized applications.
IOTA’s Pollen testnet also keys into the growing trend of tokenizing real-world assets with the use of blockchain technology. To support tokenization, Pollen will allow individuals to “‘color’ IOTA tokens with different attributes that represent real-world assets such as buildings, IoT devices, or even company equity.”
Beyond introducing new features, IOTA claimed in today’s announcement that the new testnet improves the stability and instrumentation of both the auto-peering and the gossip modules on the network. There is also an enriched dashboard with a brand new Tangle explorer and visualizer for easier access to core network data.
IOTA (MIOTA) price action: bullish
News of the Pollen testnet release has had a positive impact on the value of the project’s native token, IOTA (MIOTA). At the time of writing, MIOTA, with a market cap of $605.3 million, has recorded a 4% gain on the day, a figure that is way higher than most other significant market cap cryptocurrencies in the last 24 hours.
Meanwhile, in a recent interview, Dan Simerman, head of financial relations at the IOTA Foundation, argued that the project’s feeless architecture helps to strengthen the crypto market as a whole by expanding the numbers of users and the abilities of the digital market in the world.
