IOTA Released Smart Contract Protocol Before Coordicide Rollout

IOTA released smart contract protocol with an alpha release before its Coordicide rollout so the developers can try out the upcoming WebAssembly smart contract platform as we can see more in our latest IOTA news.

The IOTA protocol is continuing its pivot towards smart contracts implementation and as announced, the project released a more stable iteration of the smart contract platform that is in a pre-alpha stage. The new version shows the readiness of the technology and allows developers to compile and test smart contracts for the first time that are based on Rust and the WebAssembly Framework that is putting it in a similar development environment with recent smart contract platforms like Near Protocol and Polkadot.

The overall architecture of the ISCP is similar to the existing sharding-based projects and the chains will also act as a layer-two environment that is validated by IOTA’s Tangle is a ledger based on the Directed Acyclic Graph. These validators don’t need to verify the chains at once as the creators will choose the mechanism they prefer. This will allow the creation of both open networks and enterprise chains that will focus on the IOTA Project.

The IOTA team expects that the alpha release will attract more developers that want to build applications in DEFI and NFT in the near-term and for the IOTA developers, building new projects will not be as easy as taking a code and using the same strategies of many current ETH competitors. The IOTA project now plans to have an environment-agnostic presence with the support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the smart contracts being in an intermediate roadmap.

As IOTA released smart contracts protocol, the alpha is being rolled out in parallel with the GoShimmer Testnet. The “MANA” module will be released this month and will allow integrating the ISCP chains into the Coordinator-free testnet but in the meantime, the developers will deploy isolated testnets and will develop Dapps in the IOTA environment, as one spokesperson said:

 “The vision of ISCP is to run in production on the fully decentralized IOTA protocol without a Coordinator. That is what we are building for with GoShimmer and we are very confident that we will be able to achieve that this year.”

The alpha smart contracts show signs that the project is confident about the plans and will look to grow a bigger developer community but the team still has to work double-time to compensate for the late start in the competitive landscape.