“Lightning Smart Contracts”
Whether we like it or not, cryptocurrencies has come to stay. The governments in some countries have tried to label it as an illegal form of payment. No matter how hard they try to scare people, it becomes very strong.
In fact, the more news reported about crypto being a bubble, the more coins we see being launch weekly.
Nonetheless, there are coins that offer no value at all, in fact there is a good chance that in the future a good number of them will fall off the map with only the very best surviving the challenge.
Scalability and privacy are one of the major issues facing some cryptocurrencies, however there is a new blockchain platform called Aeternity that aims to solve the issues of scalability, privacy and transaction speed.
Aeternity aims to improve cryptocurrencies in general by eliminating inefficiencies in the crypto market. It also increases scalability of smart contacts by moving contract execution off chain.
State channels can be considered as lines of communication which make it possible to execute smart contracts off-chain. What this means is that that the state channel contracts can operate with greater privacy as well as with increased efficiency during transactions.
Thanks to this method the contract remains private and the blockchain can settle the score by acting as a private administrative system for smart contracts thus, an increase in throughput levels.
What is Aeternity?
Aeternity is an open-source smart contract platform that was launched in January 2017. It aims to solve the scalability and security problems faced by many cryptocurrencies. This goal is to make other cryptocurrencies better. In other words it is a project that eliminates inefficiencies in the crypto market. Aeternity is designed to deliver unmatched efficiency transparent governance and global scalability.
It possesses a distinct feature called state channels. These state channels makes it possible to execute smart contracts on-chain only and in a case where there’s a disagreement between the contracting parties, the smart contract code get enforced by the blockchain. These smart contracts are not directly linked to the blockchain unless there happens to be a disagreement between the two parties.
The benefits of this is that if you have those traditional real world data companies that want to enter into the blockchain but may not fully understand it or maybe don’t want to fully enter into the blockchain they can use these smart contracts and not really be connected to the blockchain unless there’s a disagreement.
As other coins, consensus is achieved in AE via a novel hybrid proof of work (PoW) and proof of stake algorithm. Just as other blockchains are already using Oracle. Oracle connects real world data with smart contracts. This basically works by providing access to data outside the blockchain. This feature allows users to ask questions then get various answers. Some real-life examples for this could include checking any of the cryptocurrency prices, the price of gold or the weather in any part of the world.
Aeternity uses dual languages for its development. It uses Sophia which is a high-level language based on OCaml scripting language and a simpler language called Varna. Both languages supports Aeternity’s objects such as contracts and oracles.
Aeternity allows its users to have customised identities which can be used anywhere on the internet. This will allow the users to have control over what they share on the internet.
Who created it?
Aeternity’s core team consists of ardent cryptocurrency believers who are experienced in the blockchain domain and also experts in their various specialization.
- Yanislav Malahov
Founder of Aeternity. He is a computer science graduate and an Entreprenuer. He has exchanged ideas with a lot of blockchain experts and he is fondly called the “Godfather of Ethereum” after he envisioned in 2013 to have a power influence on blockchain algorithms.
- Marion Vogel
Director at Aeternity. She is a graduate of Business Administration. She was fascinated and inspired by the phenomenon of blockchain technology in early 2014.
Her interest is in nurturing the relationship between technology and the ever growing community. Her influence has been felt on the socioeconomic impact as well as spreading the word and handling Aeternity’s operations effectively. She also has an MBA in Marketing Management.
Why does it exist?
Aeternity’s existence is basically to deliver unrivaled efficiency by providing a clear and visible governance with a focus on global scalability.
Aeternity creates a relationship between two users which are recorded on the blockchain and it enables the users to send a line back and forth so as to create trust with smart contracts between them that are enforced and settled by the blockchain.
According to its Whitepaper…
We believe that the lack of scalability, scripting safety and cheap access to real-world data of current “smart contract platforms” come down to three core issues:
First, the currently prevailing stateful design makes smart contracts written for the platform hard to analyze, and statefulness combined with sequential transaction ordering complicates scalability.
Second, the high cost of bringing realworld data into the system in a decentralized, trustless and reliable way complicates or outright prevents the realization of many promising applications.
Third, the platforms are limited in their abilities to update themselves, in order to adapt to new technological or economical knowledge. We believe that each of these three problems have clear solution paths that should be explored.
It is very often entirely possible to store all information in state channels, and only use the blockchain to settle any economic results of the information exchange, and as a fallback in the case of dispute. This suggests an alternative approach to blockchain architecture in which Turing-complete smart contracts exist in state channels but not on-chain. This increases scalability since all transactions become independent and can thus be processed in parallel. Additionally, this means that contracts never write to shared state, greatly simplifying their testing and verification. We believe that this design emphasizes that blockchains are about financial logic rather than data storage; there exist decentralized storage solutions that complement blockchains perfectly.
You can read the full Aeternity Whitepaper here.
Trajectory
The future is definitely bright for Aeternity. Since it was launched in 2017, coins such as Zilliqa has adopted its scalability feature.
Aeternity’s founder and his team launched Aeternity beer aepp in Berlin in May 2018. The attendees present at the launch were able to perform their first transactions on the blockchain.
Sometime around late May 2018, an article on Aeternity’s Blog which gave an insight on the state of deployment of the aepps. It reported that its dev team are planning on launching an update 0.15.0, on the Testnet which will be ready for deployment on June 7th 2018.
They also stated that the deployment of this update will provide an effective working relationship of Bitcoin-NG consensus, by ensuring that the aepps’ team can now start enjoying a very good and faster network speed with credit given to the smaller processing block times.
Staring from June 2018, the team are planning on migrating aepps to the Aeternity blockchain. They have also added a utility widget in the Messages aepp. This will allow seamless access to features of other aepps. This utility widget allows users to have access to a utility button to the right of their input box. The functionality options available to the user from other aepps is opened when the button is being tapped. It then pulls information and allows a user to complete a task from another aepp.
On June 4, 2018, Aeternity announced that Alexander Kahl has joined the Aeternity Dev Tools Team. They believe his expertise on full stack development will enable developers with little understanding in blockchain to write a commanding and algorithm for blockchain.
According to Aeternity’s roadmap, it is believed that there will be a security audit to be performed in the second quarter of the 2018 and also its Mainnet is expected to be released in the third quarter of 2018.
So far, there has been a top notch communication in company development between Aeternity and its communities. This is every stakeholder’s desire to be able to hear of latest developments in the company s/he owns a share with.
