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The Year of Omega

2022-04-23 20:28:38

It’s in April of every year that we celebrate the birthday of Ixian, and today marks 6 years of Ixian. In the past year we’ve reviewed and checked every “nut” and “bolt” of the project, which in turn helped us create a sustainable and achievable plan for improvements and optimizations.

We have had the chance to measure all that has been achieved and reaffirm our goals as a team, and as a community.

The past 12 months have been exciting, exhausting and most of all challenging. Our community has grown tremendously, the number exceeding several thousand members, and so has the number of nodes in the Ixian network — the last count shows this to be over 900, making Ixian a truly decentralized network. Which is something we have been aiming for from the start. The community has become more involved in the project, and we have a select number of node operators that help us with testing of new releases.

We have seen the creation of a new community mining pool — Changeling, and there seems to be another one in the works. The official Ixian mining pool has transitioned from Kiramine to MineIXI.

Spixi has received its first of many big updates, which brought several improvements such as biometric authentication and lock screen. It gave users the ability to switch between dark and light themes. Included were also major fixes, optimizations and improvements.

There have been a lot of movements in the IXI markets, seeing IxiCash reach its all-time high and a massive volume increase. We have built the IXI bridge, which facilitated the creation of wrapped IXI that is now available on the biggest decentralized exchange — Uniswap.

Ixiac Consensus Protocol —Ixiac Omega

It’s in the past year that we undertook one of the biggest tasks yet — one we knew would bring Ixian one step closer to its final form and shape. It’s something that we have been working tirelessly towards and we are but a few steps away from completing it — the finalized Ixiac Consensus Protocol, better known as Ixiac Omega.

A lot was said about it, what it will mean for the project and why it is so important. It is worth reexamining the main benefits and improvements that it will bring:

  • Optimized data structures, which directly influences the processing performance and bandwidth/storage requirements for blocks and transactions.
  • Using addresses without checksums in the protocol, which brings more performance and scalability benefits to the platform overall.
  • Requirement for nodes to occasionally perform Proof of Work to sign blocks. This ensures all active nodes have proper hardware that can handle high amounts of transactions. In addition, it disincentivizes operators from running many nodes on very cheap/low-end hardware to game the signing rewards mechanism.
  • Major optimizations to wallet state structures, that translate to more performance and scalability benefits to the network.
  • Important preparations made for transitioning from SQLite to RocksDB — this will significantly improve storage performance and affect storage space requirements in the future.
  • Transition from PIT/TIV to merkle trees which will improve scalability and performance for client applications like Spixi.
  • Transition from SHA2 to SHA3 hashing algorithm for all hashing operations.

We needed to devote a significant amount of time and resources to achieve this, and we are very excited to see it come to fruition. It is a crucial piece of the Ixian jigsaw, one that opens an entirely new path for Ixian.

We hope you will be a part of it, as you have all been so far.

With the pending release of Ixiac Omega, Spixi will also be receiving considerable updates, which include a brand new rendering engine on Windows PC platform, support for macOS and lots of bug fixes and tweaks based on community input.

Ixiac Omega Public Test

Having said all that, we’re proud to announce the public test pre-release of Ixian DLT v0.9.0, which includes the new Ixiac Omega consensus mechanism.

Help us test Ixiac Omega by running a pre-release version of Ixian DLT v0.9.0 available here https://github.com/ProjectIxian/Ixian-DLT/releases/tag/v0.9.0-dev.1

Stay positive,

Team Ixian