Hello IoTeX developers and supporters! After almost two months of hard work from the team, we are proud to announce the re-opening of the IoTeX Testnet, which will be aggressively evolved to Mainnet Alpha in the following weeks. The new Testnet has significant improvements over the previous version. We have made amazing strides in terms of performance, reliability, and security — we can’t wait for you to test it!
In this blog, we shed light on how to get started and interact with the Testnet and what’s coming up soon for IoTeX. But first, let’s review some of the new and exciting Testnet enhancements!
Testnet enhancements
- Staking/voting on Ethereum, while using an Ethereum smart contract’s status to instruct IoTeX blockchain to perform Delegates swaps, which is unprecedented !
- Implement rewarding protocol and enable gas collection
- Migrate to API V2, which is based on grpc from Google
- Migrate to address V2, which is more concise and has better compatibility with Ethereum addresses
- Enhance P2P layer
- Full support of EVM
- Replace MPT with delta trie to minimize memory footprint
- Add command line utility to interact with IoTeX blockchain
- And much more …
Getting started
Ready to create a full node and explore the IoTeX Testnet? You can get started in a few easy steps. Check out the full config + deployment instructions here:
GitHub - iotexproject/iotex-bootstrap: Config and instructions for running IoTeX node
If you have any questions, our tech team is standing by to answer your questions in our gitter channel. We would love to hear your feedback!
- If you succeeded, please tweet @iotex_io to tell us about your success!
- If you failed, please help file a bug report.
What’s next?
This new Testnet marks the start of our final sprint towards the biggest milestone — Mainnet Alpha! In the next 8–10 weeks, we will cut a release candidate on every Thursday, push it to testnet on every Friday, collect feedback, fix bugs, improve reliability and performance and add on features when needed. In addition, we are also excited to kick off the IoTeX Delegates Program. We have a wide variety of Delegates already onboard — investors, technologists, community, researchers, and economists. Let’s build the future of IoTeX together!
In the near future, we will be kicking off the staking/voting process, where IoTeX token holders will elect Delegates to maintain and grow the network. Mainnet Alpha is coming up soon — we will have more detailed blogs on this soon, but in the meantime we hope you have fun exploring the IoTeX Testnet!
For more information on our Delegates program, please see our requirements and voting/rewards process blogs. You can see the initial set of Delegates here — be sure to note your favorites and vote for them starting next week!