Æternity: Mainnet Turned One Year, Next Edition of Starfleet, Tokensale Example Application, A New Version of Æproject Is Available, Meetup in Sophia

Published in

Paradigm

13 min readDec 4, 2019

Biweekly update 19th November — 3rd December

Hello and welcome here again! æternity is doing great as always: more than a year has passed since the first live incarnation of the æternity blockchain — Roma Release — and now all the progress can be transparently seen. “It should not be difficult to build a blockchain application on aeternity,” the ædevelopers believe. Well, they work hard towards making excellent dev experience come true! Recently, dev team was focused on gathering all of the developer tools into one to form one powerful bundle, called the Development Suite, that aims to bring the ultimate experience for developers by having all of the tools and services in one place.
Moreover, they created an example tokensale app to showcase how easy it is to create a token sale/contribution campaign on top of aeternity blockchain with this standard by merely using a small wrapper contract that defines the price and the rules of the token sale. The Base æpp team worked on released v0.18.0 in production and v0.18.1 in the public beta programs (Testflight and Android Public Beta). The ForeverAENS 6, a small showcase prototype project, which is built in Elixir within one day of SDK’s hackathon, was introduced. This application automates all the activities needed to “hold” a name in æternity blockchain. Furthermore, the StateChannels biweekly development update depicted a significant amount of progress. Firstly, the state password has been replaced by an auto-generated id, that removes complexity from the WebSocket protocol while increasing the stability of the reconnection process. Secondly, the noise connection setup will retry upon failure a few times to cope with intermittent network issues that enhance the testing setup where intermittent such problems led to failed test runs. In addition, several bugs and errors were fixed.
The AirGap/PapersDev team worked on AirGap Wallet, Vault, and Coin Library, adding Multi-Page QR support, proceeding serializer improvements, and preparing everything for the release.
æternity puts an effort not only on development but also on the community æxpansion and social side. Yanislav Malakhov discussed a decentralized future on æternity as part of Genesis DevCon. He also shared the æternity story, how he built a company that is solving problems in interoperability and scalability in the blockchain. Besides, the æternity meetup in Sophia was a huge success. The topics of presentations included: node garbage collection, miner consensus signaling, types of forks, and blockchain security. By the way, several interviews and articles were published. Don’t miss the interview with Pablo Coirolo, where he shares some crucial insights on æternity and gives some of his views on the Blockchain/Crypto industry. You should also check the great interview with æternityCF’s grantee Karol Skočik, who describes his work on the account state data garbage collection and how it increases the æternity blockchain’s overall efficiency.
The community keeps increasing: there is a slight growth in the number of subscribers in social networks. December is going to be an extremely fruitful month for æternity! Stay tuned!

Development

Developer activity (from Aeternity Coinlib.io)

Tokensale example application — the dev team wanted to showcase how easy it is to create a token sale/contribution campaign on top of aeternity blockchain using this standard by simply using a small wrapper contract that defines the price and the rules of the token sale. So they created an example app. It can now be accessed on TESTNET via your base-aepp at https://tokensale.aepps.tech.
[Update] Week #46 — Base æpp Update — During week #46 the Base æpp team worked on released v0.17.1 and v0.17.2. The release notes are:

v0.17.1: Release Notes

Bug Fixes
Fixed expiration of names longer than 12 characters

v0.17.2: Release Notes

Bug Fixes
Fixed routing bug

[Update] Weeks #47–48 — Base æpp Update

During weeks #47 and #48 the Base æpp team worked on released v0.18.0 in production and v0.18.1 in the public beta programs (Testflight and Android Public Beta). The release notes are:

{v0.18.0: Release Notes}

Features

Added confirmation prompt to New subaccount option
Added Info screen in Settings

Code Refactoring

Refactored predictive behavior in mnemonic phrase input
Bidding on names is context-aware now

Updates

Updated dependencies

Bug Fixes

Fixed name not being recognized when user types too fast

{v0.18.1: Release Notes}

Features

Deep links

ForeverAENS 6 is a small showcase prototype project, which is built in Elixir, by using Aeternity Elixir SDK. This application automates all the activities, needed to “hold” a name in Aeternity blockchain. This small showcase project was built within one day of SDK’s hackathon. ForeverAENS 6 is a console application, made to automate name claiming job and other functionalities.

This app allows a user to:

Pre-claim and claim a given name (if the name wasn’t found in the blockchain and there is no current auction for it).
Prolonging given name before the expiry by user-defined number in blocks.
Monitor and automatically bid for a given name (if the name’s auction is active and if the user has enough tokens for making a new bid).

State Channels bi-weekly development update — Mid November 2019

{Replace state password with unique channel id}

Implementation: PR #2911

The state password has been replaced by an auto-generated id. This id acts as an authentication token for clients when reconnecting to a channel and is used internally to encrypt the channel state. This change removes complexity from the WebSocket protocol while increasing the stability of the reconnection process.

{Add meta info support for all off-chain updates}

Protocol: PR #439

Implementation: PR #2992

The meta info field was previously only supported for update operations. This change expands on that by also supported deposit and withdraw operations.

{Propagate noise session error to the client}

Implementation: PR #2954

A client would receive a generic error when the noise connection setup between FSMs experience problems. This change improves this by providing a client with a more descriptive error in such cases.

{Improve noise stability and log errors}

Implementation: PR #2976

The noise connection setup will retry upon failure a few times to cope with intermittent network issues. This also improves the testing setup where such intermittent issues led to failed test runs.

{Bug-fixes for issues found during testing}

Protocol: PR #438

Implementation: PR #2968, PR #2995, PR #2996,

Various subtle bugs where fixed which were found through property-based testing.

{Integration Test Improvements}

Implementation: PR #2993

The integration tests are continuously being improved. Still, they are focusing on fixing intermittent errors that are hard to reproduce but get in the way of all contributors when they occur during testing in CI.

{Protocol Improvements}

Protocol: PR #2985 1

General improvements to the documentation of the SC protocol.

{State Channel UAT Test Suite}

Implementation: PR #26, PR #29, PR #30, PR #31

The initial CircleCI configuration has been merged and is working such that new PRs can be verified now. This improves the reliability of new PRs greatly. Following that the UAT has seen lots of general improvements through refactorings of the scenario API and adding support for cancel and malicious_close.

The new documentation of the æternity blockchain Python SDK is online. Get started and build your first Blockchain application. It is as easy as building a simple web app. Check it out here thanks to Andrea Giacobino and the Ape Unit team.
Check out the recording of aeternity developers and researchers call of Week #47: Learn all about the internal hackathon organized by the SDK team + many updates on aepps, statechannels, wallets, and development tools.
Check out the Week 47 update by the AirGap/PapersDev team:

AirGap Wallet

Multi-Page QR support
Use aeternal.io 3 instead of aexplorer
Chart improvements
Prepare for release

AirGap Vault

Multi-Page QR support
Prepare for release

AirGap Coin Library

Serializer improvements
Added backwards compatibility to the serializer

Other:

AEX-7 officially closed
AEX-129 has been opened (content to follow)

[Update] Week #48: Latest Dev-Suite Updates

[A new version of the AEproject is available!]

(The changelog 1 is also available.)

Separated node & compiler commands. This was previously introduced as incoming and it is now official! Additionally, if you’d like to have both your node and compiler started — aeproject — env should do the job.
The Jetbrains plugin has been completed. It will be uploaded on their platform soon. In this release, they replaced the deprecated already epoch references in the docker-compose configs and substituted them with aeternity ones.
A transaction inspector included. The inspect command unpack and verify the raw transaction. You would have the opportunity to check why your transaction has failed.
Added functionality to remove deprecated dependencies on aeproject init — update.
Fixed some related issues with docker-compose for Windows.
Fixed a little bug in the compiler for other networks. In a special case, if the compiler is not running, AEproject threw an error while trying to deploy on mainnet or testnet.
Added templates while reporting a bug/feature request, so the errors introduced on GitHub are well described with steps for reproduction. With this change they will be focused more on the work for the problem to be eliminated and in the best scenario will be able to start digging around it straight away, rather on the back and fort communication on how to reproduce the bug.

Token Migration

They managed to sign tx with trezor over MEW and provided the solution to the forum, but they still have issues with metamask.

Change Log

[Aeproject version]

New release 2.0.1
New commands included in the cli
Jetbrains has been completed.
Removed old epoch reference in the docker configs
Added func to remove deprecated dependencies
Docker-compose support for windows

Social encounters

“aeternity blockchain meetup in Sofia has just started.” Here are Yanislav Malakhov and Emin Mahrt welcoming the attendants:

The topic of presentations include:

- node garbage collection

- miner consensus signaling and types of forks

- blockchain security

æternity’s Mainnet Turned One — the first live incarnation of the æternity blockchain — Roma Release — was launched one year ago. In the article, you can find a short retrospective of the past 12 months. Learn everything about events, protocol updates, applications, partnerships, community expansion! Protocol improvements were to be introduced with three scheduled hardforks announced at the time of the Roma Release. Minerva Update came in February 2019 and tweaked the gas price, the key block header, and the smart contract language Sophia. It also introduced a new optimized version of the æternity virtual machine (AEVM). Next in line was Fortuna — in June 2019, the Fortuna Release incorporated the results from the first-ever on-chain governance vote on the æternity blockchain — the Block Reward Initiative (BRI) (more info below). Moreover, Fortuna introduced Generalized Accounts (GAs) and thus made æternity flexible enough to support any signature scheme by enabling transaction signing by smart contracts. The most significant of all æternity protocol upgrades so far has been the last one — Lima. The Lima hardfork was performed smoothly in October 2019. It introduced a number of new features and improvements. Lima enabled the new, fully-customized and highly efficient virtual machine (VM) called Fast æternity Transaction Engine or FATE.
Workshop on building smart contracts on aeternity blockchain using Sophia at WeAreDevs in Vienna!

Yanislav Malakhov on the stage with keynotes about decentralized future on aeternity as part of Genesis DevCon.

He is sharing the Aeternity story, how he built a co that is solving problems in interoperability and scalability in Blockchain. The video is accessible via the link.

Check out the interview with Pablo Coirolo by BTC Bros. Pablo shares some important insights on Aeternity and gives some of his views on the Blockchain/Crypto industry.
Great interview with aeternityCF’s grantee Karol Skočik: Karol describes his work on the account state data garbage collection and how it increases the aeternity blockchain’s overall efficiency.
Last week AeternityUruguay’s Team Lead Gonzalo Sobral took part in a conference dedicated to waste management. UniversidadORT had invited various experts to talk on waste recovery, composting, and biomaterials. See post.

Aeternity very own Mark held an AMA with Mr.Liuyang, founder of aeknow, and Ms. Jiu, CPO of Gate.io. They discussed aeternity’s future as the №1 public blockchain. You can read a summary here. Mark briefly gave the basic introduction including the aeternity foundation and ae ventures, the Starfleet project and the Universe One event in Prague, also the recently happening in Malta cooperation with MIC. Then he introduced the development of aeternity Chinese Community and the media channels in China. The ecosystem was also the main target in the following steps.

More than 100 people attended the aeternity blockchain workshop at International Blockchain Congress in Alicante. Government and university officials attended as well as many industry experts. Big thanks to aembassador Luis Guillermo Abellan Berenguer!

Upcoming events:

4th of December 2019 — æternity Blockchain Hæckathon in Sofia

Learn about:

Smart Contracts written in Sophia

2. How to build Decentralized Applications (æpps) with JavaScript, Python, Elixir and Go

3. Blockchain APIs

4. Oracles, Naming System and State Channels

12th of December 2019 — Demo Day of Starfleet 3, Malta

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

Next edition of aeternity’s Starfleet on the horizon: aeventures now accept applications for StarfleetIndia happening in Bangalore in 2020. All blockchain startups have until January 5th to apply.

Finance

Aeternity is available on Stealth Exchange.

Aeternity was added to AtomicWallet.io in the desktop release. More info here.
The third and last acceleration fund manager the Fund of Funds has chosen is Vitosha Ventures, where the CEO Nikola Stojanow is one of the 6 partners! Together the three fund managers will invest around €21M! Read more details here.

Rumors

Nitin Vinay tweeted “Breakfast with the Godfather of Ethereum — Yanislav Georgiev Malahov”

Tweet:

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