IOTA launches major network upgrade Coordicide, removes centralized network coordinator

The IOTA Foundation announced the launch of Coordicide, a planned protocol upgrade which removes the network's centralized coordinator.

According to the press release, Coordicide aims to provide a new type of decentralized mechanism for securing data and digital assets on IOTA's Tangle-based network.

While the IOTA network was in its early stages of development, the protocol's developers created a Coordinator to ensure the security of user funds.

All transactions and activity facilitated by the Coordinator are validated by IOTA network nodes, "Such that [user] funds cannot be lost nor transactions reversed," the platform's developers explained.

According to IOTA's founders, the launch of the Coordicide protocol upgrade marks the completion of a major milestone.

As confirmed in the release, the IOTA Foundation recently established the IOTA Research Council and added more members to its research team.

The Coordicide security solution is based on a design that increases the overall flexibility of the IOTA protocol.

Per the release, the recent protocol update could potentially allow data streaming services and various other real-time applications to be hosted on the IOTA network.

Although the IOTA network has been developed using advanced cryptographic algorithms, it is notably not based on blockchain technology.

Instead, the IOTA network is based on the directed acyclic graph data structure, called the Tangle.