We are happy to announce that the new and improved IOTA PoWbox (previously: IOTA Sandbox) is ready for use!

About the PoWbox

The IOTA PoWbox (Proof of Work box) is a service provided by the IOTA Foundation that enables developers to offload PoW to an optimized remote service, thus speeding up their development workflow — think of it as PoWaaS. Indeed, one of the more tedious parts of IOTA development is waiting for PoW, which can take a long time, especially on low-powered machines or handheld devices.

The new and improved PoWbox works similarly to the old Sandbox, but with a few major improvements:

The PoWbox now leverages Kubernetes autoscaling across our dedicated GPU farm and a separate cloud provider. PoW should take less than a second in most cases — about one-tenth of a second at MWM=9.

You can now get an API token for the IOTA PoWbox via GitHub OAuth integration. Simply press the button, connect your account, and include your API token with requests. (Note: You must have a verified GitHub account to use the PoWbox — your email address and access logs will be recorded to prevent abuse. We will observe and adjust the rate limiter as necessary to keep the PoWbox available for everyone.)

The PoWbox code has been ported to Node.js to make it more accessible to more developers, and will soon be made available on GitHub. The repo comes complete with instructions for running via Docker or Kubernetes with a few simple commands.

Check it out here:

https://powbox.testnet.iota.org/

Example Usage

The PoWbox uses a simple shim to integrate with iota.lib.js . We have provided the package @iota/curl-remote that monkeypatches the attachToTangle command. It’s quite simple to get going:

Source Code

The code for the PoWbox server is freely available. We provide a PoWbox for the IOTA testnet, but we encourage you to spin up your own PoWbox to help PoWer your applications on mainnet as well. If you find this useful and would like to share your use case with us, we would love to hear about it!

https://gitlab.com/iota-foundation/software/powbox/powbox-server