Do you speak Aergo?
Launching the Aergo mainnet in April 2019, while most popular blockchain platforms launched in 2017 and 2018, gave us many second-mover advantages. We were able to make a few observations about how different platforms performed in multiple verticals regarding network setup, technology design, and adoption strategy.
We’ve looked at some of the stuff that worked and some that didn’t — and we’ve considered all of it when making Aergo.
The way we are building Aergo, our new enterprise blockchain platform, looks 10–20 years ahead. We have spent a lot of time thinking about what really matters — and we can say it’s not just about transactions per second or fancy cryptography.
To become the Blockchain for Business, we want to limit friction and increase convenience. While having the features that make the technology powerful, such as speed, reliability, and flexibility, ease of use is a huge factor we consider when thinking about mass adoption of Aergo. Just look at any of the great technology companies, you’ll notice a growing trend!
Do you speak Aergo?
This is one of the first questions we thought to ask ourselves when planning and developing Aergo. Other blockchain projects choose to invent completely new languages. Or use Klingon, which has 100 fluent speakers worldwide!
In this way, they impose a lot of friction and inconvenience on their most crucial target audience: the developer community.
It is critical for us to encourage as many developers as possible to build on Aergo. Making the barriers to entry as low as possible for them will be key to Aergo’s success.
As such, we have chosen to base our technology stack around SQL. It has over 8 million speakers worldwide!
SQL is a very well understood and perhaps the most widely accepted language for programming and managing data, yet it is currently almost completely neglected in blockchain.
More popular blockchain platforms such as Ethereum prefer procedural support for smart contracts. Procedural smart contract languages are modeled around the principles of “object-oriented programming”: in essence, data access is modeled using less comprehensive structures like key-value store, rather than a relational model, which is more widely adopted among enterprise-IT engineers.
The data access functionalities offered by procedural smart contract languages are too basic. Developers building on blockchain end up spending a lot of time working around their limited data access functionalities.
Aside from being very familiar to millions of developers worldwide, SQL provides extremely efficient ways to access and manipulate data stored in distributed ledgers. It’s far more powerful than the procedural means found in most blockchain implementations.
On a SQL-based platform, the bulk of business logic for smart contract use cases can be represented by what is known as a data definition language. In this way, languages designed around SQL provide a more complete support for building smart contracts.
Since smart contracts on Aergo can be written with SQL-like syntax, they provide a very familiar experience for existing database developers and will ease the learning curve for creating smart contracts.
They will also maximize the portability of data schemes from existing non-blockchain applications! Aergo supports a relational data structure model and allows business logic to be defined through a SQL-like scripting language. Data structures can be created, manipulated, and accessed using traditional database programming practices. Business logic using this relational data model can be created and invoked in SQL.
The familiar SQL interface supported by Aergo is intended to allow the blockchain protocol to support more developer-friendly methods for building applications and opens up the potential developer base for Aergo to a massive 8.5M+ business engineers — a pool of potential blockchain developers currently completely untapped.
We believe providing more traditional database functionalities will open the doors to millions of new developers to use blockchain; building innovative applications and services in a way familiar to them.
We have big plans for the rest of the year and this could see our team visiting every corner of the globe to connect with many different communities. We may need help from local guides or to brush up on our language skills.
But there’s one thing that we know for sure.
When we go out there and meet groups of developers and we ask the question: “Do you speak Aergo?”
There’s a very high chance the answer we get back is “Yes, we speak Aergo”
