Æternity: The Lima hardfork Was Performed Successfully, Payment Application Update (0.9.20), A New Version Of The Elixir SDK, Microsoft-backed MIC Partners With Æternity To Promote Blockchain In Malta
Biweekly update 22nd October - 5th November
æternists are welcome! The development teams, foundation, and grantees keep making us proud of their work. They continued moving forward on the roadmap, and finally, the Lima hardfork was performed successfully at block height 161150. Thus, the aeternity Mainnet is currently running Lima Release 5.0.1. The upgrade adds a sophisticated, improved virtual machine (VM), governance, and naming system to challenge Ethereum and other blockchain platforms. As for other development updates: the aeternity blockchain Naming System or AENS gone live and the video tutorial where Emin Mahrt showed how to register a name was published; AirGap worked on implementing security fixes discovered in the security review and making the library more secure by protecting it against insecure dependencies; SDK JS and Python 6.0.1 for æternity is now out; Æternity payment application was updated, featuring restored deposit after channel-creation functionality and support of a cancellation of base-aepp SIGN dialog at Channel Open request.
Furthermore, a brief recap of æknow progress and few updates of grantees were published. Karol Skocik worked on the first implementation of AENS.update function support in Sophia contracts for ænode. Juraj Hlista released a paper about a new approach for signaling outcome computation — the initial assumption that the miner indicating parameters could be modified during node restarts and decided it’d safer not to be able to modify them instead was changed; the second approach uses a database table to store aggregated signal count per a key block.
As for the social life of æternity: several videos, interviews, and articles were published, meetups and workshops were sponsored and arranged. Don’t miss Michal Zajda explaining in his recent article how the fusion between æternity and the Bitcoin-NG protocol delivers a UX and technical leap in the everyday blockchain. Besides, did you hear that aeternity is among the nominees at the MCannabizWorld awards? The æproject is in the race for “Blockchain of the Year”!
By the way, æternity had previously announced a partnership with Uruguay’s Digital Party to build a new system to optimize the country’s democratic process and internal voting in a transparent and decentralized manner. As part of this partnership, a DApp based on the “liquid democracy” model will be created and would employ digital tokens and smart contracts for the internal governance of the Digital Party. Now, Microsoft-backed MIC partners with Aeternity to promote blockchain in Malta. Mass adoption is near! Importantly, the æcommunity is super-supportive, and the number of subscribers in social networks has a slight increase. Stay with us, and we will keep you informed!
Development
- The Lima hardfork was performed successfully at block height 161150. The aeternity Mainnet is now running Lima Release 5.0.1.
- Check out the work of Juraj Hlista, one of the foundations grant recipients. Technical Paper on Miner Signalled Consensus Upgrade is available here. The signalling using the key block header field info is backward compatible, as the meaning of the value of such field is not under consensus. The activation of the new consensus protocol based on miner signalling is meant to be a temporary measure during the time interval when the new protocol may be activated on the network while the node is running. Once the network reasonably settles on whether to activate the new consensus protocol, the user is meant to enforce such decision on the eventual node restart either by configuration or by upgrading the node to a new version.
- aeternity’s developers and researchers provide deep and comprehensive progress reports every Friday. Get all the updates on the core protocol, SDKs, dev tools, wallets and aepps via the recording of call #43 here and the call of week #44.
- Check out the latest update coming from the AirGap /Paper:
Implementing security fixes discovered in the security review
- Update to latest Ionic 4 version and Angular 8 with improved performance
- A lot of internal changes/bugfixes in preparation of the upcoming release
- Working on making the library more secure by protecting it against insecure dependencies
Other
- AEX Call and feedback for the metadata AEX
- Post Lima Token Migration call / discussion with other devs
- A new version of aeternity’s Java SDK is now available. SDK JS 6.0.1 for aeternity is out! Contains a fix for the name auction schema. Install it with NPM. Release.
- Python SDK 6.0.1 for aeternity is out! Fixes the node compatibility range check. Install it with `pip install aepp-sdk==6.0.1`.PyPI. Release.
- Brief report of aeknow. Learn more about the AEknow progress via this document.
- The aeternity blockchain Naming System or AENS is live! Check out this video tutorial Emin Mahrt has prepared to show you how to register a name.
- Æternity Payment Application Update #10 (0.9.20)
CHANGE LOG — 0.9.20 (191025)
- Updated Aeternity SDK to 6.0.0
- Restored Deposit after channel-creation functionality. This should already work with nodes >= 5.0.0-rc5.
- Supports cancellation of base-aepp SIGN dialog at Channel Open request.
- Fixed an issue where merchant payment notifications may get lost
- Close channel/Deposit/Withdraw screens won’t let display to sleep to prevent connection gone broke.
KNOWN ISSUES
- Scrolling issues with Android. Please switch to floating keyboard if needed.
- When OnDemand mode is active, Withdraw is not available.
- Canceling 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 while on-chain tx is in course.
Progress:
- Released a new version of the Elixir SDK with full compatibility to aeternity node v5.0.0-rc.5.
- Secured Keystore implementation, supporting various cryptographic functionality, as well as improvement and bug-fixing on private key related activities.
- Added additional layer on private key, in order to hide it when BEAM VM is crashed, so the key won’t be seen in crash logs.
- (WIP) Middleware — added support for API calls.
- (WIP) Spend-by-name — possibility to make spend transaction by providing only a name of a recipient.
This is what happened in September, for earlier updates tap the link above.
Further improvements to NS happened during September in two areas.
- The first is implementation of AENS.update function support in Sophia contracts for AE node: PR 2781
- This work requires support in bytecode and Sophia compiler changes as well.
- Summarized report with more detail can be found here.
- The second change is allowing the name hash to be used for querying of oracle: PR 2797
- Summarized report describing this improvement is here
September
The refactoring work continued, which resulted into several pull requests ( PR #2760, PR #2763, PR #2769, PR #2774, PR #2778, PR #2793, PR #2800, PR #2802, PR #2804, PR #2837, PR #2847).
Moreover, a new approach for signaling outcome computation was suggested — they changed the initial assumption that the miner signaling parameters could be modified during node restarts and decided it’d safer not to be able to modify them instead. The second approach uses a database table to store aggregated signal count per a key block (PR #2868).
End of September — mid-October
With the addition of the miner signaled consensus upgrade, the configuration of the node was changed as well. Also there were unit and system tests implemented. All of this was part of the PR #2868. Moreover, there were two minor issues found and fixed (PR #2910 1, PR #2913).
Social encounters
- Check an article about how aeternity blockchain developers take on Ethereum with final hardfork. As the third and final major æternity protocol upgrade this year, LIMA adds a sophisticated, improved virtual machine (VM), governance, and naming system to challenge Ethereum and other blockchain platforms. This upgrade delivers improvements to state channels, in which the aeternity network relies on to power scalability. Built into æternity’s first layer, opening a lightweight state channel is a simple transaction, with computation completed by a trusted node. Once set up, state channel users do not need to pay fees or spend gas to execute smart contracts and transactions. All communications are private until published on-chain in the case of a dispute or after the closing of the channel. In addition, LIMA introduces æternity’s next level of decentralized governance and the completion of its full migration from Ethereum to the æternity blockchain. Initially created as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, the AE token has now fully migrated to the æternity mainnet. This was made possible in part by generalized accounts, which make æternity highly flexible and let developers create smart contracts that can verify transactions.
- Josef Bergt from Nägele Rechtsanwälte elucidates in-depth the legal nature of STOs at aeUni. How does the Liechtenstein law treat the different types of tokens? And why it is currently the best jurisdiction to establish your blockchain startup in — learn in the recent video.
- “What Happened During Our European Roadtrip” — check how the team traveled all over Europe to promote aeternity’s Starfleet program and to meet interesting blockchain startups.
- Berlin Blockchain Week aeternity Meetup — AMA Session with Yanislav Malahov, æternity Founder. Learn how do politics affect the blockchain space and how will the AE project develop in the next 5 to 10 years.
- Aeternity: Bitcoin-NG the way it was meant to be — Michal Zajda explains how the fusion between æternity and the Bitcoin-NG protocol delivers a UX and technical leap in everyday blockchain. æternity is a completely new platform-oriented blockchain. The æternity team designed the protocol and implemented a reference full node. æternity also builds a whole ecosystem of æpps. Among the features that they envisioned as a means to make it a next-generation blockchain are protocol-level oracles, state channels, a powerful and secure VM, a naming service, and a fast consensus protocol. This post describes the journey they took to implement the system around blockchain consensus to achieve their goal.
- aeternity Universe One Workshop — Sophia Smart Contract Development, Milen Radkov
A detailed workshop on aeternity’s smart contract language Sophia was organized as part of aeUni. It was held by Milen Radkov — founder of hack.bg and long-time AE contributor and supporter.
- Such amazing participation by the members and panelists at DISCLOSE2019. See post.
- Richard Titus interviews aeternity founder Yanislav Malahov at CoinAgenda:
- M. Mueller-Eberstein tweeted “Jurisdiction: Cardano is bullish on Wyoming. Aeternity: analyzed globally and decided for Lichtenstein.”
- TraDEXsocial rocked Aeternity Universe One Conference — here’s what you missed. The team was in Prague to present their project — an ecosystem designed to simplify mining, storing, selling, and exchanging crypto-assets — read and learn more about their experience.
- Did you hear that aeternity is among the nominees at the MCannabizWorld awards? The AE project is in the race for “Blockchain of the Year”!
- The Uruguay workshops started with Philipp Piwo:
Upcoming events:
- Code Mesh LDN conference is happening next week and aeternity is happy to be sponsoring it! This year’s edition will have Robert Virding — the co-creator of Erlang, as a keynote speaker — November 6–8, London.
- Developing æpps on æternity Blockchain using Sophia Language Workshop — November 11–13, 2019 | Berlin
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 Malta — Introducing Lecturers and Mentors. The 1st expert you’ll meet at the Genesis week in Malta is Marcin Szymanski. He will enlighten the new wave of blockchain startups in the LeanStartup Methodology. Next, Stefan Ignjatović and Petar Atanasovski from MVP Workshop will present their custom-made blockchain Business Model Canvas. Meanwhile, aeternity’s Stoyan Vasilev will teach startups how to develop their products.
- Microsoft-backed MIC partners with Aeternity to promote blockchain in Malta.
“Having æternity promote and nurture blockchain startups from the Microsoft Innovation Center will not only bring a more flexible development of new technology but will also be an opportunity to promote blockchain as a tangible technology that brings real value.”
Aeternity had previously announced a partnership with Uruguay’s Digital Party in order to build a new system to optimize the country’s democratic process and internal voting in a transparent and decentralized manner. As part of this partnership, a DApp based on the “liquid democracy” model will be created and would employ digital tokens and smart contracts for the internal governance of the Digital Party. Aeternity blockchain is also being used to track the chain of Montevideo-based medical and recreational cannabis producer, Uruguay Can.
Rumors
No updates.
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
- Introducing Roma: The First Live Implementation of the æternity Blockchain
- æternity’s Roma Release is Here
Protocol Upgrades
Roadmap
Getting Started with æternity Blockchain
- Tutorials and Guides (for developers and miners)
- Documentation Hub (very useful!)
- æternity protocol at GitHub
- Oracles at GitHub
- State Channels at GitHub
- Smart Contracts at GitHub
- Sophia — Smart Contract Language at GitHub
- Naming System at GitHub
- Governance at GitHub
- Bitcoin-NG at GitHub
- Forum (the best place to get support)
- æternity Development 101 (free course at dacade.org)
- æternity page at BitcoinWiki
- General FAQ
- Technical FAQ
- Mainnet FAQ
- Website
- Bug Bounty at HackerOne
- Bounty for Fixing Outdated Tutorials
- Mining AE tokens (Video by SavageMine)
- 2018: A Year in Review
æternity Ventures
- Starfleet 2019
- Æternity Launches Starfleet Incubator for Blockchain Innovation by Bitcoin Magazine
- æternity Ventures Website
- æternity Ventures Blog
- Twitter Account
æternity Crypto Foundation
