IOTA: Mainnet Coordinator

Coordicide, the effort of removing the Coordinator from the IOTA networks, is well under way in its research phase. One step in the journey towards Coordicide is making the inner workings of the current network set-up fully transparent. We want to do that with an open-sourced version of the Coordinator running on Mainnet.

The open source Coordinator, called Compass, was originally released a few months back. One of its main functions was that it allowed anyone to set up a private network, run tests, or develop PoCs more easily than before.

Part of the plan was always to have the Coordinator run on all official IOTA networks. Compass has now been running tested on the Spamnet and Devnet for quite some time. Now the time has come for the final step — Mainnet.

The Coordinator is an important part of the IOTA networks, protecting the network from adversarial parties. We believe that using the open source version will improve all the aspects of the networks, while making the way they work more transparent for everyone.

We will be replacing the Mainnet Coordinator on April 10, 2019. The process will consist of releasing a new, breaking version of IRI, together with performing a global snapshot.