The IOTA 2.0 Development Network has the following attributes:

• Feelessness. A user can issue a message without having to pay a fee to anyone.
• Security. An attacker cannot influence the network rules, double-spend tokens or flood the network with spam.
• Decentralization. All nodes play a role in the consensus process. Consensus is achieved without relying on leader elections.

Chrysalis is secure and feeless, but with the IOTA 2.0 DevNet, it is now also fully decentralized.

The removal of the Coordinator alone is not sufficient for achieving decentralization. In fact, the consensus mechanism originally proposed in the IOTA white paper required that the majority of transactions always come from honest network participants. In other words, honest actors would need to own a majority of the network’s hashing power. However, without miners, IOTA has no concept of constant, honest hashing power. The implication is that honest nodes would need to send a continuous stream of transactions, regardless of whether they are actually using the network.

At the core of our consensus mechanism there is a voting protocol through which nodes request the opinions of other nodes in order to decide which messages should be included in the Tangle, and which should be orphaned.

Leading up to the current release, a number of challenges were solved to allow for the removal of the Coordinator. The new solution is modular, meaning that each protocol component can be independently replaced should new research reveal further optimizations.

The IOTA 2.0 DevNet is an independent network based on the same principles used in Coordicide. As the DevNet proves over time to be as robust as we expect, we will use what we learned from it to prepare our final mainnet implementation. Thus, the IOTA 2.0 DevNet, as our first implementation of our fully decentralized solution, plays an integral role in achieving the final goal of fully decentralizing the IOTA network.