Aeternity is another company to replenish our “biweekly updates squad”. Let’s get acquainted with a company of “blockchain architecture that is scalable, governable and scriptable”. Over a period of two weeks, the AE team was extremely active on the social side: the first standalone hæckathon was organized by an aeternity aembassador; Robert Virding, co-creator of the Erlang programming language used by aeternity, spoke during the WeAreDevs Conference in Berlin; Aeternity guys even had a blockchain boat trip in Berlin! The team coped with discussing numerous significant things about Aeternity development, including Erik Stenman speaking about FATE — The Fast æternity Transaction Engine makes coding easier and safer as opposed to the EVM. Moreover, they gave a talk about blockchain phenomenon in general: the second part of “Can Blockchain Win? ” looking at Social Media Platforms 2.0, another discussion about blockchain and games; the episode #15 of BlockchainFromTheBlock podcast featuring Luka Sučić and Ivan, who discussed the state of the job market and how blockchain will transform it. Aeternity cares about the community and devs, so the guide helping to install the aeternity node on AmazonCloud is now published, they also manage to post a comparison table, which distinguishes aeternity from other networks and it is easier for people to make a decision about network participation. Well, AE community cares as much: there is a growing activity in social networks, forum and chat. Get to know Aeternity with us!
Development
- The æternity mining community adopted the Fortuna Release at block height 90800. The first Fortuna block was mined at 09:53:04 UTC by beepool. The scheduled hardfork introduced generalized accounts. Learn more about them in the video! The Fortuna Release incorporated the result of the first on-chain governance vote (BRI), migrated more than 72 million Ethereum AE tokens to the æternity Mainnet, and introduced Generalized Accounts (GAs).
- A new major version of the ForgAE tool is now available on nmp. ForgAE is an aeternity framework which helps with setting up a project. The framework makes the development of smart contracts in the aeternity network pretty easy. It provides commands for compilation, deployment of smart contracts, running a local node, local compiler and unit testing the contracts.
- Aeternity (AE) Pools have been launched in US.
- They’ve started drafting a comparison table which depict the difference from other blockchain projects.
“The paper relies on benchmarks from the Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Erlang has a long history of debating those benchmarks, since they are not very representative of the kind of applications Erlang is uniquely suited for. A noteworthy example of that might be that the study in question excluded the thread-ring benchmark, because too few languages even had a working solution for it (in newer versions of the benchmarks game, this test seems to be completely missing). This is one of the few benchmarks in the suite where Erlang really shines, even though the parameters have been adjusted down to make it more possible for other languages to compete: the number of processes in the ring was for example limited to 503, since many environments would crash on higher numbers. By contrast, Erlang can easily handle hundreds of thousand processes, even millions, with no performance degradation. There is more: In long-running, complex systems, performance is often limited by other things than sequential speed. The inventors of Erlang had long-since known that about 90% of the performance in telecoms systems depends on speed in process spawning, context-switching and message passing, so Erlang was designed to excel at this. Also, over time, memory fragmentation may hurt both performance and memory efficiency, so Erlang has highly sophisticated memory management to keep fragmentation at a minimum. Erlang is also very good at idling when nothing happens. These things can easily become disadvantages in short micro-benchmarks, where the goal is to perform one task with maximum speed and then terminate. This is also not how blockchain nodes behave. Looking at the Aeternity seed nodes, the cpu ‘idle’ is at ca 97%. The node uses around 400–500 Erlang processes, which is not much for an Erlang system, and their aggregated memory footprint is around 150MB. I’d say the system is running pretty efficiently.”
- SDK JS 4.0.1 for aeternity is out! Fixes for the compiler interface & a new bundle for the browser.
- A guide on how to install the aeternity node on AmazonCloud. If you want to run a node, but you don’t have powerful enough hardware, use awscloud!
Social encounters
This time, aeternity’s Luka Sučić and Ivan discuss the state of the job market and how blockchain will transform it.
- AE’s Erik Stenman met with WeAreDevelopers to tell us all more about FATE! The Fast æternity Transaction Engine makes coding easier and safer as opposed to the EVM! Learn what fundamental problem Ethereum coders run into and how FATE solves it.
- Robert Virding, co-creator of the Erlang programming language used by aeternity, spoke about functional programming and announced the full-day æternity workshop during the WeAreDevs Conference in Berlin.
- The first standalone hæckathon organized by an aeternity aembassador is a fact! Stephen Sunday set up the first-ever blockchain hackathon in Nigerian Plateau State. Learn all about participants, projects, jury and winners.
- When blockchain meets satellites, the moon is just the first stop. SAT-1 Initiative’s Zdravko joined aeternity’s Luka Sučić and Ivan to tell them how starfleeter HomePort will transform satellite data. Episode 16 of BlockchainFromTheBlock via link will explain you everything.
- The “Building on aeternity blockchain” workshop by Milen and @thepiwo at WeAreDevs in Berlin.
- Photo Gallery: House of Blockchain’s First Birthday Party. Yanislav Malahov, æternity’s Founder, officially opened HouseBlockchain first birthday party with a few words dedicated to æternity, the state of the blockchain industry in the past months, and his experiences with this year’s Consensus Conference in New York.
- Discussion on DAOs on Aeternity forum. “There are some cool use cases happening now with DAOs and decisions not money related. If you have metamask and a little ethereum to play with, try https://alchemy.daostack.io/ 2 to see. Lots of decisions are made without proposing finances.”
- Last week’s call — Week #21 — was quite interesting.
If you want to learn how the core dev team prepares for the forthcoming Fortuna upgrade, or how the Wællet team is working to allow payments through WhatsApp, make sure to watch the recording.
- Aeternity Ventures birthday — “Thank you all for coming to the Blockchain Brunch and for the support during these 2 years!”
Gaming and Blockchain really do go hand in hand if you think about possibilities it can do for various collectible, trading and management functions in many games. This good match was spotted by one Serbian team of developers and avid gamers who are just preparing to launch open beta for their ‘blockchain trading card game’ — the Cryptic Legends. With Nemanja Avramovic, their CEO, Luka and Ivan are discussing all the interesting details about the blockchain in games and the Cryptic Legends as well. For non-gamers this is completely noob proof episode (ignoring the few terms and names) and considering the amount of bad puns, quite good one to laugh at or with.
- The blockchain technology is way too young to guarantee the comfort and ease most businesses need. They looked into the 5 most common issues entrepreneurs face when dealing with it.
- An article on “Can Blockchain Win? — Social Media Platforms 2.0 [Part 2]”.
Encrypted communication is becoming the preferred mode of exchanging information between users. The most popular messaging services have already introduced end-to-end encryption. Facebook’s Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, Wire and Signal have all implemented message encryption (some were created for that very purpose). However, chat encryption can mean many things. Here is a comparison chart:
“In a world where data is more and more valuable, everything online is being monitored, and users realize both of those facts, Social Media Platforms 2.0 featuring data protection and control and which allow bullet-proof chat encryption, file sharing and voice calls, will be of high demand. The great part is that these features are only part of the advantages of the next generation of social media platforms can implement. Look out for the next part of the series for a deep dive into Social media-incorporated cryptocurrency payments and Decentralized exchanges.”
- Nikita Fuchs, our Developer Evangelist, talks about aeternity’s unique SmartContracts design! Learn why Sophia is way better than other languages.
Upcoming events:
No updates.
Rumors
- You can become a travelling ambassador of Aeternity. More info via link.
Partnerships and team members
- Aeternity is happy to share that aeternity joins DCARPEAlliance as a new member and premier service provider to offer decentralized data oracles services. Shyft Network and æternity will become premier providers of digital identity infrastructure and decentralized data oracles, respectively, on the DCARPE Assurance and Disclosure Platform. Both will collaborate with Auditchain and other members of the DCARPE Alliance to integrate each service into the DCARPE Explorer as third-party service providers for enterprise consumption and utilization.
- Aeternity’s Starfleeter UTUtrust has just partnered with Graychain. Their goal is to enhance credit scoring on the blockchain! GrayChain CEO, Paul Murphy was recently in Kenya to meet with Utu Technologies to discuss the partnership that would see African customers soon have the ability to link their UTU profile to the Graychain platform. This will allow Graychain to take that trust data into account when computing those consumers’ credit scores and generating credit reports.
Finance
- Aeternity’s Base aepp wallet is now available in iOS and Google App Stores.
- Binance has quietly opened Mainnet AE token trading.
- Meet waellet — the browser extension wallet for the aeternity blockchain. Waellet is the solution to make the interaction with the aeternity blockchain network more easy and intuitive. The goal is to build the next generation of browser extension wallets. Build around aeternity, Waellet is to become a tool that enables users to pay for different services without the need to worry about the network of the particular dApp — this will happen in a decentralized and cryptographic secure way through integration with the WeiDex — decentralized exchange.
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.
