Still Lacks Support

IOTA stops processing transactions for 15 hours because of a bug in its “Coordinator” which presents a centralized node with the task of determining the confirmed transactions as we are reading in the IOTA news.

The IOTA Tangle ceased processing transactions on December 29^th around 11 a.m. The bug was identified and resolved after 15 hours of the blockade, as was reported by The Block. During the outage, the system could still transfer data and the users could still read the transactions.

The co-founder of IOTA. David Sønstebø described the bug as “minor.” The problem will be resolved when the enterprise move away from using the Coordinator, which will happen with an upgrade named Coordicide, he noted.

 “Whatever the bug is, there is no reason to panic over such a minor issue pre-Coordicide. This is precisely why Coordicide takes time, one can’t execute it until all possible kinks have been ironed out.”

The management of IOTA was heavily criticized by the people in the cryptocurrency sector for categorizing the problem as minor. The difference being in that IOTA unlike other systems utilize a directed-acyclic graph or DAG instead blockchain. The system has challenges and potential that are unique and while experimental there are certain advantages in comparison to the blockchain. Transactions are confirmed by confirmation from at least two other transactions instead of mining or staking.

But for the proper validation of these transactions, a centralized node controlled by the IOTA Foundation that is called the Coordinator is essential. More research and development is required for a directed-acyclic graph (DAG) to work without the said bottleneck. In May of 2019, the IOTA Foundation announced that they are working on developing an upgrade named Coordicide in order to get rid of the Coordinator. The Coordicide is scheduled for completion by the end of 2020.

 “According to the bug fix, the IOTA Reference Implementation “didn’t account for a transaction that was shared between two distinct bundles. Once it marked it as ‘counted’ in one bundle, it was ignored for the next bundle. This lead to a corrupt ledger state.”

Irrespective of the cause of the problem, the blockade notes centralization and issues about reliability that the IOTA Foundation must resolve before it’s reediness for any crucial adoption and before IOTA stops processing transactions again.