One of the most requested feature by the community was the ability to connect to a remote IRI instance, making it possible to use the GUI without any of the overhead (such as finding neighbors). We’re happy to announce that after weeks of development and testing, we’ve finally taken the IOTA GUI Lightwallet out of the Alpha stage and are now opening it up for the wider public to use in our Beta.

Major shoutout to Wesley and Paul who made this possible.

How it works

When it comes to choosing between running a Full and Light Node, the GUI makes it incredibly simple to switch between the two. Most importantly, all the code an the binaries are hosted in the same repository, which means that you always just have to download the official GUI and can after a successful install choose whether you want to go Light or Full.

Even though we encourage people to setup full nodes and participate in the actual network, if you choose to light node option all you really require is a remote node to connect to. Either you have set one up yourself and have enabled --remote access, or you know someone who has a remote node that you can connect to. Community members have already started setting up such services that make it possible to connect to their nodes.

All you have to do then is to enter the IP / DNS of the node and that’s it! Now you can successfully connect to and use the IOTA Network.

What’s important to note here is that you’re still doing the Proof of Work. This means that your computer will do the computation required to making transactions. The remote node is simply used for getting network stats, broadcasting transactions and getting tips.

GPU’s to the Rescue

The beauty of CCurl (https://github.com/iotaledger/ccurl) is that it has OpenCL support. This means that (if you have OpenCL installed), you can now start hashing a lot faster with your GPU.

Conclusion

Now with the light wallet support, it should be super simple for people to get started with using IOTA. It should be noted that this is still Beta software and that there are probably some bugs here and there — if so, please report them.

The next step for us will be to develop a browser hashing solution.