Aeternity (AE) Review – A New Approach to Ethereum-Based Smart Contracts

| Publish date: 09/20/2018 (Last updated: November 22, 2018 09:51 AM)
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NameAeternity
TickerAE
Total Supply273,685,830
Initial Price$0.68
CategoryBlockchain Platform
Website URLhttps://Aeternity .com/
White Paper URLhttps://github.com/Aeternity /protocol

Aeternity is more than a blockchain project, it is also a movement. The technical project is a public, open-source, blockchain-based distributed computing and digital-asset platform that focuses on making smart contracts safe, efficient and economic. As a movement, it envisions a world with alternatives to the current governance, economic and financial intermediaries.

The Idea Behind Aeternity

Ethereum developers have long admitted that the challenge of scalability is “perhaps the single most important key technical challenge” that all blockchains face.

Aeternity is a new improved version of Ethereum that solves the scalability problem by enabling transactions to take place off-chain. Disputed transactions are resolved on-chain, with the Aeternity blockchain functioning like a crypto-court. It also enables fast and cheap contracts with its multiple high-level Virtual Machines (VM) written in Sophia and Solidity languages.

With the able to scale, Aeternity can be used by the enterprise. Aeternity has numerous use cases that include: a distributed applications ecosystem, decentralized fintech, trustless exchanges, micro and nano-payments, crowdfunding projects and instant video game rewards.

The team is headed by Yanislav Malahov, who is known as the godfather of Ethereum and worked as the lead developer with Vitalik Buterin at one point on an earlier project. Before Aeternity, he worked at Bitalias, a blockchain naming system. He has explained that he was impacted by the financial market turmoil after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and became very aware of economic inequality. Aeternity is his way of using the blockchain to create a more inclusive global economy.

“Our Blockchain can give the people of this planet greater access to financial tools that can be scaled up, don’t crash or slow down,” Malahov said to Cointelegraph. “Aeternity also will allow real-world information to flow into the Blockchain, without relying on centralized sources.”

Aeternity’s development team has some of the best Erlang developers in the world. The team includes six PhDs, ranging from backgrounds in computer science to distributed systems and security.

Aeternity Partnerships

Early in their development, Aeternity  partnered with Erlang Solutions to work together on blockchain scalability issues. The language is a good fit for the project because it allows the writing of code that can respond to many requests and doesn’t crash. In addition, the servers with the highest uptime in the world are based on Erlang.

In July the company announced partnerships with Trakia Tech, a platform with a goal of digitally transforming the manufacturing, finance and other traditional industries, and Comrade Cooperative, a company whose mission it is to become the first fully functional example of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) governed on he blockchain.

   
 

 

Aeternity Price History

AE raised $24 million in their ICO at the end of June 2017.

After the token was sold for an initial price of $0.68 in July 2017, it reached a peak of $5.00 in April of this year. It has been on a downward trend since.

The Aeternity Technology

Aeternity’s architecture has a number of components which make it unique:

 Oracles

Oracles are translators that communicate between the real world to blockchain, and smart contracts specifically. For example, it could be used to create a smart contract to perform an action like transferring tokens or cryptocurrency to an individual’s address. Since Aeternity’s oracles are part of the core protocol, it has eliminated the need for an additional layer of smart contracts to implement the oracle.

Oracle operators charge fees in AE in order to query its data. This is the same data used to executive smart contracts – which is located in smart devices, local weather stations, financial institutions, manual input or prediction markets.

Wherever the source, the data is verified via multiple different oracles which need to have the same answer to the question. Responses are then registered on the blockchain and are immutable. They remain on the chain until a certain number of blocks are created.

Bitcoin-NG and Cuckoo Cycle Proof of Work


Although the Nakamoto consensus is currently the most widely used, its scalability is limited. Aeternity uses Bitcoin-NG, a hybrid of Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) to solve this limitation. After blocks are mined in a similar manner to Ethereum and Bitcoin, a leader is elected, who is allowed to issue micro-blocks until the next block is mined. This method provides greater transaction speed.

Aeternity believes it can reach speeds of 6000tx/minute or 100tx/x on-chain. In addition, Aeterity uses the Cuckoo Cycle, the first graph-theoretic PoW algorithm that includes instant verification and large memory requirements. The end result is that users do not need powerful mining rigs to mine Aeternity.

State Channels

State channels support transactions between users as well as the execution of smart contracts. The state of the transactions is always agreed upon before a transaction occurs. These state channels are trustless and secure, with participants being able to close channels to shut out malicious users. Since these channels transfer interactions off-chain, it allows for lightning-fast transactions.

The Sophia Smart Contract Language

Sophia is a smart contract language that makes it easier to test and verify codes, decreasing errors and bugs in the code. A functional Ocaml-like language similar to Reason, it was designed to write safer code. It can directly access all of Aeternity’s other features like the naming system, state channels, and the oracle function.

Naming System

Most blockchain systems use hashes to identify entities, displayed in a hex notation and difficult for the human eye to read. Aeternity’s naming system enables improved usability, a reduction of misspelling identities and the increased adoption of the platform.

The AE Token

The AE token is an Ethereum-based token that will be replaced once the company has its mainnet launch. The new token will be utility-based and used to pay for transaction fees on the network, similar to the that ETH has for Ethereum.

How to Purchase AE

The main way to purchase AE is through Binance, which currently has one of the largest volumes of AE traded at half a million, allowing you to exchange AE with BTC, ETH and BNB.

AE is also available on the following exchanges:

How to Store AE

AE can be stored in any wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens such as Coinomi, MetaMask and Myetherwallet.

For maximum security, however, you should store your AE on hardware wallets such as Ledger Nano S and Trezor.

Roadmap and Future Updates

Aeternity started its development in Q1 to Q3 of 2017 and launched its testnet.  They have attended numerous events through the world, including the Blockchain Summit, Crypto World Party and the Intercontinental Blockchain Conference in Brussels.

It is currently working on its mainnet launch.

The team has a roadmap available on their website and they frequently publish development updates on their blog. Those who are more technical can track the progress of developers through the project’s Github.

 

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