Biweekly on IOST: BaaS Platform, Cooperations with Hyperledger and AWS China, IOST New Staking Mechanism, IOST…

Mainnet Statistics As of March 28th, 2020 IOST Blockchain-as-a-Service Platform IOST has always been looking for the most innovative ways on how to improve functionality and overall work of small or large businesses and governmental organisations. A growing number of progressive enterprises are now aimed at integrating blockchain technologies to establish a decentralized, efficient, secure, transparent and immutable platforms which can guarantee an overall growth of productivity and eventually a higher yield and profit. IOST has recently come up with breakthrough solutions to help businesses thrive. IOST has officially open its brand-new Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform, also known as “the Aircraft Carrier Plan”. Firstly, we will briefly highlight the main characteristics and advantages of BaaS and secondly, we will focus on how the platform can be successfully integrated in different sectors. Key Characteristics and Benefits of BaaS: IOST BaaS is based on six underlying core technologies of blockchains: multi-cloud support, multi-chain support, permission management, smart contracts, privacy protection, and consensus mechanism. BaaS is customized by Hyperledger Fabric, the most widely used consortium chain system in the world. It can simultaneously update millions of data and support the upload of hundreds of millions of data. Through the IOST BaaS consortium chain, it is possible to achieve decentralized management, immutable tracking, auditing, data traceability, reliability privacy and security. BaaS can open corporations to various types of enterprises, developers, local government departments, and other organizations, providing direct technical services, consultants, blockchain training, and promotion services to create an open and win-win blockchain business ecosystem. IOST BaaS Platform can provide various blockchain solutions to the following sectors: Government Affairs The e-government platform based on IOST BaaS will adopt point-to-point encrypted transmission and rapid approval of “smart contracts”. This can help to achieve cost reduction, efficiency, transparency & traceability, and information security encryption, breaking data isolation issue. Judicial Field The judicial consortium chain based on IOST BaaS reduces the cost of electronic evidence storage and enhances the authenticity of electronic evidence, thereby improving the efficiency of litigation. Supply Chain Sector With IOST BaaS, companies on the chain can achieve peer-to-peer communication and transactions without the need for intermediaries, which can reduce trust costs. The information contained by on-chain nodes is identical and automatically updated. This will help to eliminate manual operations and paperwork consequently reducing costs. Moreover, IOST BaaS will provide more resources for big data analysis based on the supply chain, improve data quality, reduce the risk of data leaks, and make Big Data become possible. Charity Taking into account the immutability and traceability of the platform, donors and recipients can be effectively connected and everyone can check the flow of donated materials. In addition, the use of blockchain smart contracts can also solve problems such as complex processes and black box operations in traditional charity projects. Internet of Things IOST BaaS IoT chain will greatly reduce the pressure on the computing side and also unleash more possibilities for new organizational structures of the IoT, providing more room for innovation. Secondly, the accuracy and immutability of the consortium chain records also make the privacy and security evidence-based. Energy Field In P2P power transactions between users and generators can be achieved through an energy consortium chain developed on IOST BaaS. For the determination of loss, the conversion loss between different energy sources, the long-distance transmission of energy, and other losses caused by other operations can be notarized more transparently through the blockchain. Art Trading Field IOST BaaS can build a highly trusted decentralized artwork data database, including photos, collectors, affiliated artists, transaction information, and review information of artworks, etc. can be uploaded to the blockchain network. During the transaction process, art enthusiasts can extract artwork data from a decentralized network, view the artwork information, and make a reasonable valuation of the artwork. IOST aims to build more partnerships with the government and different enterprises to help them adopt blockchain technology and improve their businesses. IOST is dedicated to the research and development of blockchain technology and to the continuous introduction of trusted blockchain platforms and products to the market. source IOST Updated Mainnet Olympus v3.3.2 Official Launch Two Major Updates 1. Further improvement of the cryptographic library In the previous version v3.3.1., they had added a new hash function to the on-chain cryptography library: ripemd160. Cross-chain atomic swaps are an increasingly widely-used requirement. At the moment, the most common implementation of the atomic swap is Hash Time Locked Contracts, being the ripemd160 protocol is one of its most important cornerstones. Projects like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Decred, etc., also make use of ripemd160 for Atomic Swap. References: https://github.com/decred/atomicswap https://github.com/AltCoinExchange/ethatomicswap After IOST integrates ripemd160, third-party developers will be able to implement atomic swaps with other mainstream chains. Furthermore, a completely decentralized cross-chain exchange will also become a reality. 2. Expired data cleaning When a new node joins the IOST ecosystem, it is often a requirement to download a blockchain snapshot to start it. The current snapshots are over 200GB which requires massive data traffic and disk storage. This massive data requirement is a potential obstacle to limit new nodes from joining. In version 3.3.2, the team developed a tool for cropping block data that can delete early block data. It can reduce the disk usage by 20 times, from about 240GB to just 13GB, without any side effects to a node’s regular operations. For nodes that will not produce blocks, it is recommended to use the simplified snapshots to start the blockchain. Related documents: https://developers.iost.io/docs/en/4-running-iost-node/Deployment.html#snapshot-with-pruned-history Three Main Code Quality Improvements 1. Improved program stability at runtime In the previous mainnet version v3.3.1, they have already fixed a minor but persistent memory leak. This fix improves the stability of the program operation. 2. Test boost In v3.3.2, we updated the testing and continuous integration of the code. Stronger testing results in better reliability. 3. Better code management In v3.3.2, the team switched the Golang dependency management to Google’s recently launched Go Modules, among other external dependencies that were also upgraded. This will simplify our code and let us implement the improvements proposed by the community more easily. The points described are beneficial for the long-term evolution, bugs fixing, operating efficiency and maintainability of the IOST mainnet. Future Plans The short-term focus will be to improve IOST’s cross-chain technology with third-party partners. The team will implement IOST’s light nodes in a well-known cross-chain ecosystem. This requires to make some corresponding changes to the IOST main chain, such as generating a receipt every time a block producer node is rotated and implementing a progressive Merkel tree to facilitate block verification on light nodes. This may require one to two incompatible version upgrades. Constant iteration and updates are the solid foundation for IOST mainnet’s stable operation. source