SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--IOST, an enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure for online services, officially launched its testnet to the public today. Its Testnet v0.5 ‘Everest’ achieves one of the highest transaction per second speeds in the blockchain industry and includes a range of functionality for developers to build upon.
Backed by $40 million from world-class investors, including Sequoia China and Matrix, and led by a team of repeat founders, IOST is laying the foundation for an ultra-high TPS network that meets the security and scalability needs of a decentralized economy. Its mission is to be the underlying architecture for the future of online service providers globally.
“We have been hard at work for the past year laying the foundation for a next-generation blockchain infrastructure. Testnet launches are a key point when a blockchain project can be experienced as a functional prototype of a ‘final product’ — where it crosses over from theory to function.” - Terrence Wang, CTO
The Everest Test Network is deployed in a real-world environment and runs on multiple nodes deployed in Tokyo, London, Singapore, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Seoul, and Montreal.
Features of Everest v0.5:
- IOST consensus mechanism: Proof of Believability (PoB) running in a real network environment
- Average throughput between 7,000-8,000 transactions per second
- Smart contracts system featuring key-value pair storage, inter-contract API calls, and multiple signatures
- API-oriented smart contracts to quickly write and deploy code
- Blockchain Explorer to display transactions and blocks
- ‘Playground’ to test smart contracts locally
- Ability to build private IOST test networks
- Ability to run IOST testnet nodes
IOST has been aggressively expanding its ecosystem over the last three months and recently launched two separate organizations with strong institutional backing to develop the IOST ecosystem:
Bluehill: a blockchain incubator and accelerator that recently raised $50 million. Bluehill provides crucial backing for IOST industry partnerships and projects built within the IOST ecosystem.
Theseus is an IOST-incubated R&D team dedicated to pushing the envelope in blockchain technology and paving the way for the IOST developer community.
IOST will implement two more testnet releases before launching its mainnet by end of 2018.
The original IOST announcement can be found here: https://medium.com/iost/public-testnet-launch-iost-everest-v0-5-b9b2ad9fb209
