With the imminent release of SemkoDev’s Hercules node for IOTA and the recent speculations and discussions regarding our intentions, I want give our followers a small update on where we are heading in the upcoming months.

Rebranding

In order to avoid confusion and misunderstandings with a potential competitor, but also to re-align ourselves with the updated mission statement, we decided to change the brand name of our IOTA products to Deviota.

The brand is being prepared and should be ready within the next weeks.

Deviota’s mission is to provide exceptional tools for easy running, maintaining and using an IOTA based infrastructure.

Deviota projects overview

With the mission statement in mind, here is a small update and an outlook for our project family:

Nelson

With the recent doubts and speculations, I want to assure our users that we strongly vouch for the system behind the Nelson Network and will continue improving it over the course of the next months.

To clear up any doubt, we applaud the IOTA Foundation’s decision to audit Nelson and their change of priorities regarding automatic peering. In our opinion this is one of the most important features for a wider adoption of the IOTA technology.

There will be a second generation of the Nelson Network written in GoLang. With several improvements. For instance, the new generation will allow selective automatic peering based on geographical locations, response speed and pre-defined “neighbourhoods” that a node belongs to. This will open doors for automatic clustering of nodes.

The new Nelson will be directly integrated as an optional feature in Hercules.

Hercules

We are preparing a public alpha release for Hercules. It is a relatively basic implementation that heavily relies on milestones. Over the course of the next months we will extend the API and further improve the performance and stability.

Additional features are planned such as:

Direct Nelson integration for optional automatic peering.

Broadcast filtering based on the new Nelson Neighbourhood clusters and sub-tangle affinity.

Post-snapshot selective transactions storage: keeping transactions based on certain conditions (tag, address, neighbourhood, source, etc).

Marketplace API allowing nodes to offer different services to other nodes, optionally collecting fees for the given service. Examples: remote proof-of-work, permanent storage and retrieval of certain transactions.

Field

There was some speculation why the Field server is not yet open sourced. The short answer and the primary reason is that our work on Hercules took all of our available time. It is against my developer’s pride to publish a dirty, badly structured code. Once ready, everything will be open sourced. Every bit of it.

The second reason is that we are restructuring the way the Field operates and are considering adding it as an optional module to Hercules. The idea is to make it possible for every Hercules node to operate as a Field client and a server — even both at once.

De facto, it will create a mesh network on top of the IOTA where the nodes can collaborate beyond a simple exchange of transactions (see marketplace above).

Field + Marketplace will enable distributed permanode system, for example.

Integrated Platform Manager

The initial vision of IoT telematics, a management tool for informational and financial flows, has been extended with a flexible platform management tool.

The Integrated Tool will allow monitoring, and management of a single full node running locally (similar to Bolero) up to a whole node infrastructure:

Hercules Nelson neighbourhoods.

Automatic and manual peering.

Transaction flows (sources, caps, etc): who can send what to whom and how much. :)

Database management and maintenance. Selective storage of certain TXs on specific nodes, while snapshotting/trimming them from the others, etc.

Additional vectors

We are actively researching the possibilities of the Tangle and looking into a very promising Coo-less consensus concept. It’s too early to publish the details, but we are getting there sooner than later!

Thanks for reading and for your support!

Roman Semko

http://www.semkodev.com

IOTA Donations welcome: