Aergo 1 Year Mainnet Anniversary

Published in

Aergo blog

5 min readApr 15, 2020

Can you believe it’s already been a year? Here’s a trip down memory lane and a brief look into what the Aergo team has accomplished so far.

Introduction

It was April 1, 2019 when the team had pushed out an update; a significant moment in the startup’s timeline. Something big was about to happen. Korea’s largest blockchain infrastructure provider, Blocko, with over 23 delivered implementations were preparing themselves for the Aergo Mainnet Launch.

The team at Blocko had been working long and hard to build a blockchain protocol that provides the performance and reliability necessary to run the Aergo main network, and to jump out of testnet waters. Enterprises could see the light, and the opportunities that lay ahead as they were soon no longer bound to a purely private environment. But let’s take a step back to retrace how we got here.

Aergo’s Humble Beginnings

Blocko’s initial product launched in 2015, a private enterprise blockchain suite called Coinstack that was deployed with major clients such as the Korean Exchange (KRX) to build their own blockchain-based OTC trading market, Samsung Card, Lotte Card, and essentially (and over time) 25+ million users in over 20 in-production systems throughout the years. See our use cases.

Though by late 2016, enterprise customers were looking for a fully permissioned blockchain (running on infrastructure of their choosing) supporting smart contracts, much more complex use cases and ideas emerged; so we got to work, and released Coinstack 3.0. With our support for Smart Oracle architecture, virtually any business model built on top of the DLT concept was able to be realized. But not long after, we were hearing a curious demand from customers.

Aergo — The Hybrid Blockchain for Business

We realized that there was a strong demand for running blockchain on cloud. Moreover, we realized that we needed a new version of Coinstack with a support for serverless computing and it seemed that smart contracts were good ways to implement serverless “lambda” functions on distributed architecture. Coinstack 4.0 so to speak, the next iteration.

Coinstack 1.0 was already built on the idea of Blockchain as a Service. A lot of enterprise customers are looking at blockchain as their “way out ticket” from their rigid enterprise IT limitations. It makes little sense to run Oracle or MSSQL on AWS, but running blockchain does.

Having worked with dozens of enterprise customers, we knew that we needed a fully-featured public blockchain network.

In 2018, Won Beom Kim created the first description of the to-be product, in the form of Aergo whitepaper, and Hun and the team started working on the implementation. This was when Aergo was born — and not long after, we had officially launched the Aergo testnet by December 2018.

The Aergo project started 2 years ago, but our journey actually began 6 years ago in 2014.

Then, after 1,665 GitHub commits at the time, countless hard hours of work from our 50+ man R&D team, and many months running our testnet..

On April 15 2019 at precisely 14:00:01 UTC, history was made.

The first block was created, and the Aergo Main Network came to life.

This was a remarkable moment for us, and our community. Amidst a turbulent market we had plowed through and since then have carved our way to develop Aergo to where it is today. Below is a timeline of what we have achieved since the inception of Aergo’s Mainnet until present.

Timeline of Technical Achievements

19 Jun 2019 — Aergo Chain Advancement

22 Aug 2019 — Aergo Enterprise Release

17 Oct 2019 — Aergo JDBC Release

25 Nov 2019 — Aergo 2.0 Hardfork, Voting Rewards

12 Feb 2020 — P2P Network 2.0 Release

3 Mar 2020 — Aergo Keystore Release

Since the launch of the Aergo Mainnet, we’ve gone deeper into expanding the Aergo ecosystem with various additions; such as:

Aergo GEM, a stablecoin on the Mainnet as part of our Reward Infrastructures As A Service (RIaaS), a service that will allow organizations to build & introduce a built-in rewards infrastructure.
AergoLite, a Blockchain-based IoT Solution for a hyper-connected society
Gotchu, a blockchain-based crowdfunding platform that connects content creators and their fans
Binance chain integration for BEP2 AERGO swap
Aergo Merkle Bridge development (Test it out here)
Aergo Connect Browser Wallet
Samsung Blockchain Wallet integration
Expansion to the MENA region with Blocko GCC
Staking, Voting, and much more to come

Now, excluding the technical developments mentioned above, we have been on a mission to further onboard our existing customers and secure potential ones. As we have seen in the previous Q3-QPU, great strides have been taken in the expansion of Blocko towards the MENA region to take on new clients and help bridge the gap between enterprises and blockchain.

Furthermore, we know that everyone in our community is very eager for the release of our latest Quarterly Project Update (QPU) — as it is very much in the final stages of checks with the board. It has a wealth of detail and information that exhausts the need for mention within this article; so sit tight as the wait is almost over!

Until then, the Aergo and Blocko team would like to wish you a Happy 1 Year Mainnet Anniversary launch, as we would not be here without our stakeholders, and our community. With that we have prepared a special video just for you. Enjoy.

Happy Mainnet Anniversary from Aergo & Blocko