Æternity: Governance Æpp Launch, Wællet update, Tech & Ecosystem News, The Naming System Is Now Available, The Migration Tool, New Starfleeters

Published in

Paradigm

13 min readNov 19, 2019

Biweekly update 5th November — 19th November

Hello, æmazing crypto world! As our updates on æternity have become a lovely tradition, we are here to provide you with all the recent news and events of this project! The development side was vivid both for the foundation and the funded entities. The migration tool for claiming AE tokens is now available. Moreover, after final work, testing, and adjustments on the governance æpp, the dev team released it to mainnet. Soon they are going to continue working on ledger support and smaller features to optimize the user experience. Go SDK 7.0.0 for aeternity is now out with HD wallets, High-level API for contracts, and more. Wællet was updated: the support for (Pre-)&lima deployed fungible tokens was added, migration UI development was started, message signing for token migration appeared as well as the new branch for wallet aex-2 rpc. The main focus during week 45 for wællet developers was on becoming AEX-2 compatible; they achieved this and have something ready on a separate branch that works currently with a fork of the SDK.
Furthermore, a new build of æternity’s state channels payment æpp is now available. It allows for auto-onboarding to a fixed payment hub without the need for a QR code at hand. Naming system was finally introduced: AENS enables human-readable names for any account, smart contract, oracle, StateChannel, hash, or value. The AirGap team continued working on the wallet, vault, and coin library.
The social life of Aeternity was similarly eventful. Various meetups and conferences were attended and arranged by the team members. æternity’s æmbassador Stephen Sunday visited Nigeria Fintech Week; he was invited to participate in a panel together with Yele Bademosi of Binance Labs and Chimezie Chuta of BlockchainNG. æventures team with Pablo Coirolo traveled to Malta and took part in numerous field-related events, including Medical Cannabiz World Summit, AIBCsummit, and Genesis Week. Boris Guevara visited the Jesús Obrero University Institute in Venezuela to make an introduction of development on æternity blockchain. More than 30 Computer Science students and professors attended the meetup. By the way, æternity plans to arrange a Blockchain Hæckathon in Sofia — don’t miss it out! The teams for Starfleet Vol. 3 were selected. Among them are SmartCredit, Cannomy, Real Fund, Comunitaria, a-Qube Farmchain, BITINEXT, and a lot more. For æventures’ full startup portfolio, check the finance section. There is an increase in the number of subscribers in æternity social networks. The community is extremely active in chats and forum. Blockchain future is near! Stay with us not to miss it!

Development

Developer activity (from Aeternity Coinlib.io)

2. The https://migrate.aeternity.com tool for claiming AE tokens is now LIVE! You can use it if you:

didn’t migrate your AE in any of the 3 phases
sent AE tokens to the migration contract
sent AE tokens to the AE token contract

Watch this to learn more.

Æternity Tech and Ecosystem News:

(You can also check the previous update on Aeternity by Paradigm.)

Developer tools

Software Development Kits (SDKs):
a) Latest (Week #44) Elixir SDK Update
b) Latest JavaScript Release Notes
c) Latest Python Release Notes
d) Latest Golang Release Notes
Latest (Week #42) AEProject Update
Latest (Week #43) Hosted Compiler Updates

Application Layer (æpps)

Latest (Week #43) Base æpp Update
Latest (Week #44) Wællet Update
Latest (Week #43) AirGap Update
Latest (Week #42) Æternity Payment æpp Update

Education

Latest (Week #44) Fire Editor Update
Latest version of dacade

Other Stuff for Developers

Latest æternity developers and researchers update calls:
a) Week #41
b) Week #42
c) Week #43
d) Week #44

Aeternity Crypto Foundation (ACF)

Final grant reports:
a) Karol Skocik (Protocol Development)
b) Juraj Hlista (Protocol Development)
Grant follow-up report:
a) Liu Yang (AEKnow)
Video Interview Kick-off with Grant Recipients

Starfleet Incubator and æternity Ventures

Latest (Week #41) Data2HONEY Update
Latest (Week #41) Cryptic Legends Update on Medium
Latest (Week #41) Abend Update
Latest (Week #44) CryptoTask Update on Medium

Standards and Governance Topics

AEX9 — Fungible Token (Forum discussion over here)
AEX11 — Compliant Fungible Token Standard (Forum discussion over here)
AEX12 — Off Chain State (Draft) (Forum discussion over here)

Æternity Blockchain Launches Integrated Naming System for Registering Readable Names to Any Blockchain Entity on the Decentralized Web.

“With æternity’s naming system, we are destroying the myth that wallet addresses and other blockchain entities can’t have readable names without being decentralized and secure,” said Yanislav Malahov, Founder of æternity Blockchain. “We have been in test mode exploring the most efficient means to register names, and we are thrilled to finally launch this system for improving the user experience.”

Governance Aepp Launch — after final work, testing and adjustments on the governance aepp, they are ready to release it to mainnet. They did take in a lot of feedback from the previous testing sessions at Aeternity Governance Aepp Public Testing 2.

All development is open source, the source code can be found here found at aeternity/aepp-governance. The software can be run by anyone and doesn’t require any secret info or centralized services. Verification of poll results is easy and can be done publicly.

Open https://governance.aeternity.com/ 24 in your base-aepp to participate in polls or create new ones. Opening the site outside base-aepp will show a read-only version of the governance aepp.

{Still in a testing phase}

This means, the aeternity crypto foundation did not finally decide how to take signaling results from the governance aepp into effect. Also participating with ledger hardware wallets is still not perfectly supported and may distort signaling results.

Once the aeternity crypto foundation makes a decision on use of the governance aepp, they will hear from Emin Mahrt in another forum post.

{Next Steps}

They will gather feedback on the current installation of the governance aepp software and eventually make adjustments that are required.
They continue to work on ledger support.
Smaller features are still in the development pipeline to optimize the user experience.
They will post a guide on how to run the governance software on for yourself.
They will post a guide on how anyone can easily verify the poll results for themselves.
They will post developer documentation to integrate the governance aepp in other wallets.

AENS .chain auctions have launched! You can participate through the Base aepp. 38k AE were used in auctions already & will be burned. The most expensive bid so far is for the block.chain name — 2500 AE. Learn more.
Go SDK 7.0.0 for aeternity is out! HD wallets, High-level API for contracts and more! Install it with `go get -u`. The release is here.
[Update] Week #44: Latest Waellet Updates — Waellet 5 is a browser extension (similar to MetaMask for Ethereum) providing users with the ability to use a browser wallet for the Aeternity blockchain. At this point, there is a big gap between the development and usability of decentralized applications built on top of Aeternity blockchain. With this browser wallet, they aim to make a bridge, connecting the two creating a user-friendly and easy to use an extension that will allow new users to start using aeternity seamlessly and at the same time ease the development of new applications on top of aeternity.

{Changelog}

Support for (Pre-) & lima deployed fungible tokens
start migration UI development
wip on AENS new functionality screens
message signing for token migration
new branch for wallet aex-2 rpc
refactoring
remove unused code
set backend option only if error is wrong abi

[Update] Week #45 — waellet

This week the work was focused on becoming AEX-2 compatible. They already achieved this and have something ready and working on a separate branch that works currently with a fork of the SDK. They are dependent and waiting for:

AEX-2 to be finalized
AEX-2 included in SDK release

After that they can proceed with including this feature in one of the next releases. They finished the work on the UI for the token migration. They did published new release this week. Consequently, that opened a new problem — Firefox is not allowing files to be larger than 4mb for extensions.

they started working on separating the build in multiple files.
they found some issues on handling pre-lima tokens and they are currently working on those

Æternity Payment Application Update (0.9.24) — This build is the first that offers the possibility to auto-onboard to a fixed payment hub without the need of a QR code at hand. This is decided at build time with an .env setting. Handbook: Æternity Payments Application (post aeuniverse)- Handbook; PaymentHub Setup.

{CHANGELOG} 0.9.24 (191106)

Auto-Onboarding mode is available setting VUE_APP_AUTO_ONBOARD_HUB_URL environment variable at build time.
Ensures that a valid channel to re-connect is available when asking for Deposit, Withdraw and Close operations.
Clicking Main Menu balance display will trigger a refresh.
Removed “always-connected” mode
Open Channel, Withdraw, Deposit and Close show more detailed progress (inclusion and remaining confirmations)
Code cleanup

{KNOWN ISSUES}

Navigating out during Withdraw/deposit may trigger failure (See aepp-sdk-js issue #767)
Cancelling transactions through Base-Aepp dialog may cause channel to enter inconsistent state.
Do not switch subaccounts except before channel opening.
Page Refresh/Exit may cause problems if a channel operation is underway. This should be fixed with future 5.1.0 node Release. This is currently mitigated by keeping display and CPU active in certain operations.

Week #45 — Go SDK Product Development Update:

An update on the Go SDK progress:

introduction of the higher-level interface (and refactoring to make that possible).
RegisterName() deals with the complexity of preclaiming, claiming for names not subject to the auction bidding system (>12 characters).
CreateContract() makes deploying a contract really easy.
AEX-10 HD wallet and mnemonic parsing support
Version 7 will be released this week with these features.
WIP: need further ideas on what tasks are complicated/onerous enough to need a high level interface

Week #45 — aeternity Developers and Researchers Weekly Update | 2019 11 08 & Week #46 — aeternity Developers and Researchers Update | 2019 11 15 — learn more about the current state of development!
[Update] Week #45 — AirGap

In week #45, the AirGap/Papers team has been working on the following tasks.

AirGap Wallet

Token Migration UI Elements removed
Improvements to the Chart loading

AirGap Vault

Testing Ionic and Angular upgrade and safe-dependencies change of coinlib
Multi-Page QRs to support smart contract calls

AirGap Coin Library

Finished work on securing dependencies
Serializer updates for new AEX

Other:

AEX Call: Discussion about new AEX numbering system

[Update] Week #46 — AirGap

In week #46, the AirGap/Papers team has been working on the following tasks.

AirGap Wallet

Multi Page QR support
Prepare for release

AirGap Vault

Multi Page QR support
Prepare for release

AirGap Coin Library

Serializer improvements

Other:

AEX Call: Decisions were taken how AEXs can move forward faster

A small demo of the multi-page QR feature.

Social encounters

æternity Universe One: Developer Track Highlights — learn more about the past aeUni!

Some of the most interesting use cases developed during the event included:

Pæy, a decentralized payment system that makes it easy for students and companies to efficiently receive payments in Nigeria. Pæy also allows the exchange of AE tokens for fiat currency (NGN & USD).
Lexon-powered æternity application for smart community sign-ups and human-readable smart contracts useful in the legal field.
MemeHunter, a platform that allows meme creators to monetize their products.
Gameternity, global login system for any gaming platform (like Steam, GoG, Epic Games Store) as a first step towards a decentralized gaming platform.
Fiæt AutomicDex, a decentralized exchange that will enable users to exchange cryptocurrencies for fiat.
Earlycrypto, a trivia game that enables users to create/host a game, add questions and answers, register players that pay a participation fee, and launch a game. The winner gets all participation fees.

aeternity’s aembassador Stephen Sunday attended Nigeria Fintech Week. He was invited to participate in a panel together with Yele Bademosi of Binance Labs and Chimezie Chuta of BlockchainNG. They discussed blockchain and regulating digital assets. Learn more here.

Pablo Coirolo was at Medical Cannabiz World Summit in Malta.

aeternity’s Pablo Coirolo is at AIBCsummit. He got interviewed by the head of media production for the Summit Jessica Walker:

One more quick interview to decentraLIVE:

Portal spoke with aeternity founder Yanislav: “Please don’t keep tokens on centralized exchanges. You’ll lose them. Created to fail; not blockchain products, just virtualized balances like banks today”.
Boris Guevara visited the Jesús Obrero University Institute in Venezuela. Boris made an introduction to development on aeternity blockchain. More than 30 Computer Science students and professors attended the meetup:

The “Developing æpps on æternity Blockchain using Sophia Language” workshop at Blockchain Technology Conference. See post.

Emin Mahrt posted: “Past year æternity blockchain has been Top-5 in GitHub activity — and these are only core Blockchain protocol and essentials. Much more is going on within the ecosystem not represented in those numbers. proud of all the product teams and developers!”
The aeternity blockchain and aeventures community had a great time in Malta! Between the Genesis Week of Starfleet3, Medical Cannabiz World and AIBCsummit, they met amazing people!

aeternity’s Erlang dev Philipp Piwowarsky visited Uruguay’s UniversidadORT. He trained Computer Science professors on the basics of AE architecture and Sophia smart-contract language. The key to blockchain’s mass adoption is education! See post.

Brilliant talk from Ulf Wiger from aeternity on Erlang and Blockchain.

aeternity blockchain’s Starfleeter AMPnet just won the Shift challenge:

Another one of use cases built on Aeternity is Bitlipa, a blockchain payments app allowing users to transact privately across Africa. See post.

Fundraising, financing, and budgeting are quite an essential part of startups’ life. Camille Pepos had an informative presentation on raising funds & VCs. Djordje Filipovic introduced the teams to an efficient way to set & track cost and revenue streams.

Upcoming events:

24th and 25th November — Genesis DevCon 2019

3rd of December — a free public meetup in Sofia, Bulgaria.
4th of December 2019 — æternity Blockchain Hæckathon in Sofia

Learn about:

Smart Contracts written in Sophia
How to build Decentralized Applications (æpps) with JavaScript, Python, Elixir and Go
Blockchain APIs
Oracles, Naming System and State Channels

Roadmap

æternity Development Roadmap Update. UPDATE: æternity’s Lima hardfork was successfully executed on October 30th, 2019 at block height 161150. The æternity’s Mainnet is now running Lima Release 5.0.1. Significant milestones were reached and we are waiting for new target milestones:)

Partnerships and team members

Starfleet Vol. 3 — Malta Edition: the teams they have selected. Among them are SmartCredit (Switzerland), Cannomy (Ireland), Real Fund (Spain), Comunitaria (Spain), a-Qube (Estonia), Farmchain (Nigeria), BITINEXT (Australia & the US), KingFootball (Switzerland), Assetify (Bulgaria) and a lot more. Check the article to learn about the teams!

More to read about it you can find here.

Finance

Here is the current AE Ventures startup portfolio.

Rumors

No updates.

Social media metrics

The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Aeternity Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from coingecko.com.

Here you can find all kinds of resources to get acquainted with aeternity! The Getting Started page is being constantly updated to help you get quickly acquainted with aeternity: It’s a rich collection of all kinds of articles, video reviews and guides, and interviews that will introduce you to the AE universe.

Mainnet Launch

Protocol Upgrades

Roadmap