A Blockchain Ecosystem to put on your radar Pt. 1!
Friday the 20th and 21st of September marked the first-ever Aeternity Universe One Conference, organized by the Aeternity ecosystem, at the Paralelni Polis (Institute of Crypto Anarchy) in Prague. Two Community “Nodes” of the Caribbean Blockchain Network (Ruben and me, Fernando) received the opportunity to visit and document this conference. This article is the first of two articles which will cover what we have experienced during the two days of this conference.
for the Pt. 2 of this article click here
But first, what is Aeternity?
The Aeternity project was first founded in the 1st quarter of 2017, by Yanislav Malahov. Shortly after that, in the second quarter of 2017, the core development of the Aeternity blockchain started.
Aeternity offers solutions to the scalability problem at the protocol level (first layer), through the implementation of so-called “state-channels (similar to the solution applied as the lightning network)”, allowing for smart contracts to be executed off-chain, thus resulting in cheaper and faster transactions between nodes. Alongside state channels, Aeternity also offers other solutions for e.x. governance through the utilization of DPOS (delegated proof of stake) allowing people network participants to take part in decision making. Also, there is a naming system inherent in the system which allows for user-friendly blockchain identities instead of an arbitrary number of random characters. Finally (not entirely) the Aeternity blockchain allows for the use of oracles, which can be utilized to connect real-world data with smart contracts, paving the way for a plethora of use cases and services (e.x. information services, prediction markets, etc.).
Of course, there are many more features to the Aeternity blockchain e.g. mobile compatibility, low transaction costs, but for more detailed information on the exact specifics, I advise you to check out their website or their forum.
Developers Track
Day one
The first day started with a presentation by Emin Marht who is the CPO of the Aeternity, and he gave a talk about the developments that have been going in Aeternity so far. He mentioned the different advantages of the Aeternity blockchain, pointing towards things like e.g. state channels, low fees for on-chain transactions, no fees for off-chain transactions oracles, etc. He also talked about the universality of Aeternity about how it could be used for multiple use cases, from governmental services, token economies to logistics. Furthermore, he also briefly touched on the software quality of the eternity protocol and how the project is amongst the only open source project that was well funded, in which professional software engineers were hired to build the protocol.
He also mentioned the performance of the protocol and on how they learned from the challenges and bottlenecks of other blockchain protocols. Another topic he touched on was interoperability mentioning oracle transactions, the use of external data and different kinds of API. Finally, he presented how developers & social entrepreneurs could get involved, he mentioned about the resources available for developers (for those interested, check out the forum, about services available for the public, about interfaces and clients (check out this link), and also about mining on the Aeternity network.
The next talk was done by Michael Zadja a blockchain architect (protocol developer) at Aeternity. He presented about the proof of work protocol utilized in Bitcoin NG how it was also applied in Aeternity’s proof of work mechanism. He also talked about some of the challenges that they faced concerning mining (mining centralization) when the protocol was just launched and how they used the stratum protocol to overcome those challenges with the help of mining pools.
Another presentation by Dr. Hans Svensson, Aeternity protocol developer, went into the top 5 common pitfalls in smart contract programming and how the Sophia smart contract language (the smart contract language) to minimize these pitfalls.
The fifth pitfall/problem is the denial of service, which means that people with malicious intent can take control of your contract and kill it, the design approach that Sophia core developers are trying to take is by creating multiple references to contracts, however, this approach method is still in the idea phase. The speaker stressed that it is still possible to create bad contracts that lock funds, after all, the computer cannot read the developers’ brains.
In the fourth problem, he explains that when for example, a user tries to withdraw some tokens, if the send function related to this contract for some reason returns false, the deduction already occurred and the user effectively loses his balance. In the Sophia language, such a contract requires an additional step in which a check function is called to ensure the receiver of the funds exists, if this is not the case the contract will be completely rolled back.
Continuing, the third problem was related to arithmetic issues, particularly integer overflowing and under flowing, these issues will trick the contract to do something that was initially not intended by the developer. In the Sophia language, there are checks built into the virtual machines, with the newest implementation in the FATEVM where integers are unbounded.
Next, the second problem of access control, which occurs as a result of reckless usage of the “delegate call” function (e.g. in solidity), is solved by removing the possibility of reevaluating contracts (recalling the init function) and by removing “delegate call” entirely.
Finally, the first pitfall that the Aeternity core developer tried to address is the problem of reentrancy, this problem is a result of remotely called contracts being able to recall into the calling contract, the first DAO hack can be referenced for understanding this problem. In the Sophia language, the developers have made it impossible to recall smart contracts. All in all, with the Sophia smart contract language it is now more difficult to make the mistakes mentioned above, however, mistakes can still be made.
There was a talk on the new Aeternity virtual machine (VM) for the execution of smart contracts e.g Fast Alternative Transaction Engine (FATE), by Dr. Erik Stenman who is also a protocol developer. The talk was about the ins and outs of the new Engine. According to the speaker, the FATEVM was designed with safety in mind, and alongside safety, the team has also achieved a greater level of efficiency compared to the earlier Aeternity Virtual Machine (AEVM). He also touched on specific attributes of the VM e.g. the exclusion of memory addresses, built-in data types, function with type signatures, local variables, the compiler and more. He concluded that FATE is safer, more efficient and 3 times faster in contract execution compared to the AEVM.
Alongside many other talks, there was also a talk in which the co-creator of Erlang, Robert Virding, was invited to present, however, he could not be there personally so it was just a conference call. He talked mostly about erlang language itself, he covered many things e.g. design principles that were used to create Erlang, about the attributes of the language itself and the different systems and applications built with Erlang.
Next to talks, there were also many other activities that you could attend or be a part of. There was an graffiti art wall that could be accessed via the graffiti application on the aeternity base aepp. You could then upload an image and it would be recorded on the aeternity blockchain and appear on the wall.
Next to the graffiti wall, there was also a workshop in which the basics of writing sophia smart contracts were taught. Also, you could also buy ae tokens at the conference.
Day two
Since day two of the conference we focused mainly on doing interviews with the different projects being built in the ae blockchain, we did not visit any of the developer talks on the second day. However, the videos are all online and can be viewed if one wishes to, day 1 and day 2.
Don’t forget to read the part two of this article, in which I will be covering in brief the entrepreneurs track of this conference. see link.
