IOST releases new roadmap for the second half of 2020

The “Internet of Services” (IOS) blockchain whitepaper was written on December 31st, 2017. It proposes an “innovative and secure blockchain paradigm designed to provide horizontal scalability and high transaction throughput.”

The IOStoken (IOST) is used for making payments for goods and services on the platform and is paid as commission to validators as compensation for running smart contracts, processing messages, and managing transactions. IOST currently has a market cap of ~US$95 million. The token trades for ~US$0.0063 and its value has risen ~4.91% in the last week.

The IOS platform was designed to provide a decentralized way to exchange digital goods and services, and enable developers to deploy large scale Decentralized Applications (Dapps). Major investors in the project include Sequoia, Matrix, and ZhenFund.

By implementing our novel sharding architecture and consensus mechanism, the IOS system is able to process up to 100,000 secure transactions per second. IOST uses a Proof-of-believability (POB) consensus mechanism, which is a hybrid of the Proof-of-Stake consensus model where network nodes are selected based on their stake as well as past contributions and behavior.

The IOS blockchain implements a reputation-based sub-token system that utilizes tokens called servis. Servis are non-tradeable tokens that are awarded to good actors within the ecosystem and factor into the process of choosing the next validator. The POB system has a number of factors for node compliance including IOST balance, servi balance, number of positive reviews of the nodes and, node transaction history.

The platform also uses a system called Efficient Distributed Sharding (EDS). Sharding is a way of partitioning a database. It spreads out the computational and storage workload across a peer-to-peer (P2P) network so that each node isn’t responsible for processing the entire network’s transactional load.

The IOS whitepaper suggests that we can consider each shard in its chain as a miniature network that runs its own consensus protocol in parallel. This means that the entire network does not have to validate the same set of transactions and subsets of transactions can be handled by various consensus groups simultaneously.

Some of the major achievements outlined for the first half of 2020 include an update to the platform’s mainnet from Olympus v3.3.2 to v3.3.5. The team suggests in a recent blog that this new mainnet is “more secure, easy to use, fast, decentralized, and has high scalability.”

The IOST partner or node program has also been updated over the first half of the year and the platform has shifted to a new Staking Mechanism, v4.0. The IOST partners’ incentive policy was also updated to provide more rewards for partner nodes that make extra contributions to the ecosystem.

In terms of implementations with enterprises and governments, IOST and its enterprise arm Aiou technology inked a number of cooperations in the first half of the year. These included building the Shanyiou charity information publicity platform to promote charity transparency and help pandemic prevention and control in China in conjunction with the Blockchain services network (BSN).

BSN is China’s first national blockchain consortium and seeks to leverage the benefits of the technology to provide cross-network, cross-regional, and cross-institutional global distributed ledger technology service infrastructure.

Together, they also signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Zurich, joined Hyperledger, an open-source blockchain collaborative and, collaborated with a Japanese medical institution Pracs to build a blockchain medical record system.

For the second half of 2020, the IOST group suggests that “it will fully explore the DeFi ecosystem.” Other goals outlined include work on; Building a richer partner node ecosystem, Implementing and optimizing an IOST on-chain governance mechanism, compliance development in regions such as Japan, South Korea, the United States, and Vietnam, expanding a community plan v2.0 and optimizing the core community structure, cooperating with traditional industries in non-fungible token (NFT) deployment. And utilizing Zero-Knowledge proof technology for user privacy improvement, and implementing and applying cross-chain technology.

On July 22nd IOST announced a partnership with ProDeFi, a decentralized financial network. ProDeFi utilizes a semi-centralized approach, where lending risk is offset via classical mechanisms such as KYC procedures, credit risk bureaus, and traditional judicial processes. The blog post announcing the deal suggests that IOST and ProDeFi have features and aspects that complement each other, and the partnership will open classical finance to blockchain benefits, while also enabling broader access to IOST’s high-speed blockchain network.