IOTA Foundation Explores DAG Technology to Overcome Blockchain Limitations

The IOTA Foundation's 'Beyond the Chain' workshop, held on May 31, 2024, at Trinity College Dublin, provided a comprehensive look at how Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology can address the inherent limitations of traditional blockchains, according to the IOTA Foundation Blog.

Insights from the Workshop

The workshop was part of the IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, which ran from May 27 to May 31, 2024. The event featured contributions from several IOTA Foundation members and attracted a significant audience despite being held on the last day of the conference.

Keynote by Shai Wyborski

Shai Wyborski, a researcher at Kaspa, delivered the keynote, emphasizing the efficiency and scalability advantages of transitioning from traditional blockchains to DAG structures. He highlighted the drawbacks of blockchains, such as high orphan rates and reduced parallelism, which hinder performance.

Wyborski discussed various blockDAG implementations like SPECTRE, Tangle, and GHOSTDAG, which achieve scalable and secure consensus through topological sorting. He also introduced parameterless protocols like DAGKnight, which adapt dynamically to network conditions, improving confirmation times and network performance.

The keynote concluded with a discussion on creating rational miner incentives, exploring new fee market models within DAG structures, and addressing scalability through innovative consensus mechanisms.

Interactive Sessions

Following the keynote, the workshop featured four interactive sessions based on research papers submitted to the event.

Secure Transmission of Immutable Data for IoT Services

Andreas Baumgartner from Chemnitz University of Technology presented a paper on secure data transmission for low-power, long-range IoT services using the DAG-based DLT IOTA Streams on top of the LoRaWAN protocol. The paper proposed a network hierarchy to enable low-power IoT services, addressing challenges like small payload sizes and duty cycle regulations.

Shared Objects in Sui Smart Contracts

Roman Overko from the IOTA Foundation discussed his study on shared objects in Sui smart contracts. The paper explored the unique feature of the Sui platform, which distinguishes between shared and owned objects, analyzing the frequency of transactions involving shared objects and their contention levels.

Name Management Using IOTA

Teppei Okada from Ritsumeikan University presented a method to prevent content poisoning attacks in information-centric networking (ICN) using IOTA's distributed ledger technology. The paper proposed managing content names with IOTA to block the tampering of content registered on the system.

Systematization of Knowledge: DAG-based Consensus Protocols

Mayank Raikwar from the University of Oslo, along with Nikita Polyanskii and Sebastian Mueller from the IOTA Foundation, provided an overview of DAG-based consensus protocols. Their paper evaluated the impact of these protocols on performance and their tradeoffs concerning consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.

Future Outlook

The 'Beyond the Chain' workshop highlighted the potential of DAG-based DLTs to overcome the limitations of traditional blockchains. The event underscored the importance of continued research and development in this field. The next workshop is scheduled to be held at the University of Pisa in June 2025.