Aeternity (AE)

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 Basics

* Started in: late 2016
* Based in: Liechtenstein
* Platform, decentralized apps (prototype)
* Oracles
* Scalable smart contracts interfacing with real world data.

## History

* From this article (13-7-2018):

*"The æternity project was founded in Liechtenstein in late 2016 by Yanislav Malahov. Malahov had been working to build more generalized functionality on top of Bitcoin for many years, having, in 2013, collaborated with a teenage Vitalik Buterin on the colored coins-based Keidom project, now known as ascribe.io. In January 2017 Malahov and coauthors Zack Hess and Jack Petterson published the original æternity white paper, which describes some of the early goals and ideas for the project (though much has since changed).*

*In the second half of 2017, two coauthors of the original white paper, lead developer Hess and smart contract language guru Petterson, left the æternity project. A second white paper titled “æternity Reimagined” was started by then CTO Joel Reymont, but was soon abandoned when Reymont also left the project in November 2017. Despite these setbacks, æternity managed to launch its Epoch testnet in Dec 2017 and has continuously been updating the testnet with new features since. A full-featured mainnet launch is currently scheduled for August 2018.*

*In May 2018 æternity announced the launch of æternity Starfleet, a project incubator providing resources and support to blockchain projects that will likely be building applications on the æternity platform. Shortly thereafter æternity released a two part list of 17 projects selected for participation in the first wave of Starfleet incubation. Many of these projects are based in Sofia Bulgaria, where Starfleet’s cooperating partners æternity Ventures and Software University are based."*

## Token

### Launch

* From this article (13-7-2018):

*"From April to June 2017 æternity ran a successful token sale raising 224,750 ETH and 1456 BTC (worth roughly 50 million USD at the time of completion). Just weeks later æternity had the misfortune of being one of three wallets drained by an attacker exploiting a vulnerability in the Parity Multisig wallet. As a result, æternity lost 82000 ETH, nearly 40% of the total raised."*

## Tech

* Whitepaper can be found here (1-2017).
* Code can be viewed [insert here].
* The protocol is written in the Erlang language (13-7-2018):

*"The æternity platform is written in Erlang, a concurrent, functional language that is designed for 0% downtime. Erlang provides built-in support for hot code loading, which allows new features and bug fixes to be deployed while the system is running. The æternity core development team consists of several Erlang developers, many of whom came to the project by way of a partnership with the Erlang Solutions consultancy.*

*The æternity project plans to support three different smart contract environments that each serve a different purpose. The first environment is Solidity running on an EVM-compatible virtual machine called the Æternity Ethereum Virtual Machine (AEVM). For contracts requiring greater security, æternity has developed a second environment that uses the Sophia programming language and Functional Typed Warded Virtual Machine (FTWVM). The third smart contracts environment is aimed at eliminating the issues around decidability of contract code that introduce complexity such as gas metering. This environment consists of a restricted non-Turing complete scripting language called Varna and a very simple VM called High Level Machine (HLM)."*

* From Crypto Briefing (14-9-2019):

*"[Has] state channels for off-chain scaling, oracles for real-world information, and a naming system for increased user-friendliness. æternity also features SDKs in Javascript, GO, Phyton, Java"*

### Mining

* Will use DRM for mining.

* From this article (13-7-2018):

*"æternity’s PoW is based on the Cuckoo Cycle algorithm, a memory bound puzzle, which is believed to be ASIC-resistant. The æternity vision of users mining on their mobile phones was set back when cryptocurrency mining on iPhones was banned by Apple."*

### Scaling

* From this article (13-7-2018):

*"Although æternity’s Reimagined white paper describes using GHOST to improve transaction throughput, this no longer appears to be on the project’s development roadmap. Instead, æternity is employing Bitcoin-NG to scale the base layer. Bitcoin-NG obviates the need for GHOST because, even though the average time between blocks remains relatively long, Bitcoin-NG allows additional transactions to be processed during this time. The miner who finds a solution to the Cuckoo Cycle puzzle earns the right to produce a key block with their solution and then can continue producing microblocks with additional transactions until the next miner solves the puzzle and earns the right to do the same. The protocol includes a fee sharing mechanism to incentivize miners to build on the longest chain of microblocks rather than serialize existing microblock transactions into their own microblocks."*

## Oracle Method being used

* From this article (13-7-2018):

*"Built-in support for oracles, which æternity claims will be more flexible and universal than those currently being built on Ethereum, may enable a wider range of applications to be built on æternity. At a minimum, having a standard, built-in mechanism for oracle interaction simplifies the developer’s life by allowing them to focus on their application, rather than having to set up and integrate with a third-party oracle. This omakase approach to framework design was fundamental to the power and popularity of the Ruby on Rails web development platform. A key to Rails’s success, which æternity would be wise to emulate, is the ability and willingness to swap out the default components as better technologies come along."*

## Governance

* From this article (13-7-2018):

*"æternity proposes to use on-chain, stake based voting to decide on protocol improvements, which can range from simple parameter changes (block size, frequency, rewards, etc.) to new feature implementations. The built-in mechanism will allow users to make proposals for software upgrades and vote on them using their stake (balance of AE tokens). Votes are weighted by the amount of stake, and users may delegate their voting stake to (presumably) more knowledgeable voters to vote on their behalf. Although æternity’s marketing team may have created some confusion by describing their platform as implementing hybrid PoW/PoS consensus, this illustrates their view that governance is essentially a separate but related consensus layer. In æternity PoW consensus is used to get nodes to agree on the order of transactions and PoS consensus (i.e. stake based voting) is used to get community participants to agree on the PoW consensus rules."*

## Audits

* Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

## Competition

* Smart contract platforms.

* From this article (13-7-2018):

*"In contrast to Ethereum, which is featureless by design, æternity has opted to include certain features in the platform as “first class objects” to simplify the development of decentralized applications (dApps, or æpps in æternity lingo)."*

## Team, Funding, Partnerships, etc.

### Team

* Malahov, Yanislav; founder, calls himself the Godfather of Ethereum https://medium.com/@yanislav/king-of-bitcoin-godfather-of-ethereum-a9af9ecf56d5
* Hess, Zack; technical lead, His first "basic coin" was the attempt to write the most compact blockchain. Years later, after having worked for Augur and built a few other blockchains from scratch, he is now leading æternity's technical implementation.

* Robert Virding; co-founder and dev
* John Hughes, dev (co-designer of Haskell)
* Ulf Norell, dev (co-designer of the Agda)

## Æternity Ventures

* From Crypto Briefing (14-9-2019):

*"Æternity Ventures was founded in order to support projects leveraging blockchain technology, especially those involved with æternity. It provides funding as well as technological, legal, and marketing support to the companies in its portfolio. They also provide access to a a network of contacts,  aiding the projects in their development.*

*Æternity Ventures runs Starfleet, an accelerator program for a selected group of innovative startups, which work towards bridging the gap between what businesses need and what blockchain has to offer. Currently in its third iteration, some of the Starfleet startups will be presented at Universe One."*