Milestone 2 + 3 — WEN HORNET? NOW!

It is now more than two months since we published the last milestone report. There is a reason for this: We have done two milestones at once so that you can finally test HORNET properly. HORNET beta is released now!

In order to make the development of HORNET even faster, we are happy to have a new team member. We got support from the IOTA Foundation in the form of Luca Moser. He also acts as the bridge between the IOTA Foundation development team and us.

Over the past two months, we finished implementing the IRI API, so you now can use HORNET together with the IOTA client libraries and the Trinity wallet.

Remember: HORNET is released as a beta version and for testing purposes only. Take this into consideration when choosing the amounts of IOTA you send.

We skipped the trivial tip selection and implemented the tip selection IRI uses as well. This was defined by milestone three.

Despite HORNET using the same tip selection algorithm as IRI, HORNET is still way faster than IRI due to improvements done on the implementation level.

As defined by our second milestone we also implemented the ZMQ (ZeroMQ) topics known from IRI. This way you can use HORNET to watch Tangle events.

Thanks to the community we now have a beautiful logo. You’ll find this logo at different places in HORNET, e.g. within the new dashboard.

With the dashboard you can monitor your HORNET node and your neighbor stats.

On top of that you now have your own Tangle explorer. The Tangle explorer is strongly inspired by TheTangle.org and shouldn’t be seen as a replacement of TheTangle.org, but as a supplement.

The dashboard design is still preliminary. The IOTA Foundation kindly worked on a new design that might be integrated in a future version of HORNET.

The next step, defined by milestone four, is to implement local snapshots to support nodes with limited storage space.

But let’s get to what you all have been waiting for. As of today you can download pre-compiled binaries for all major architectures and operating systems or if you still want to compile HORNET by yourself, it’s easy to do by just cloning the git repository and running go build

You can find our GitHub repository and latest releases at https://github.com/gohornet/hornet

If you discover bugs or crashes please feel free to open a new issue on github. If you are not sure, if it is a bug, please first ask in the #hornet channel on the official IOTA discord server. As every new issue slows down our development, we should keep the number of issues as small and as accurate as possible.

Happy testing!