Feb 27, 2019

10 min read

Aion: New mobile SDKs for Aion dApp Development, SingularityU Canada webinar with Matt Spoke, more research articles

Biweekly update 13th February — 27th February

This is not financial advice.

During the last two weeks, the Aion team made progress with development. Pocket Network announced its partnership with Aion Network through the AION grant program, which has resulted in AION Andriod and iOS plugins for Mobile DApp developers. A few research articles were published: “Building the Network Steward Productivity Ratio” by Sam Pajot-Phipps — an analysis on measuring network productivity, and “The Next Wave” by Michael O’Rourke in which he discusses the impact of the Aion’s Java-based AVM on mobile dApp development. As for upcoming events, Matt Spoke named as a speaker at the 2019 SingularityU Canada Summit, and this evening he will be hosting SingularityU Canada webinar. Aion Rebuild Conference, the second incarnation of the Aionex conference is coming in April, there will be more announcements to come on this. Alex McDougall from Bicameral Ventures answered community questions on Weekly Community AMA on official Aion subreddit. This week there will be another AMA with The Pocket Network team. Aion ecosystem continues to grow, Aion Connect is live, there are a lot of projects building on Aion. However, there is a slight decrease in the number of token-holders and subscribers of Aion Telegram chats.

Development

The Next Wave by Michael O’Rourke: discussing impact of the Aion’s Java-based AVM on mobile dApp development.

There are two major cycles that have resulted in a significant explosion of the number of cryptocurrencies in existence. The first being Bitcoin, which has led to many forks, ranging from small configuration changes such as Litecoin to innovations of much bolder magnitude such as Dash and Decred.

The second movement came post-Ethereum, which spawned dozens of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based cryptocurrencies and thousands of protocols based on the ERC20 standard that was initially proposed in late 2015. One could argue that these new EVM based cryptocurrencies are a loose form of sharding for the greater blockchain ecosystem in and of itself, especially given the ways in which implementation bridges allow networks to hop in between any of the EVM based protocols.

The main challenge for most EVM based protocols is finding a value proposition compelling enough to excite existing blockchain developers to work on them and grow the market to a point where new developers are willing and able to onboard, using the new tools. On top of that, the development environment for EVM based protocols is incredibly immature — which is why Aion team is seeing other protocols choose existing frameworks and programming languages to leverage their platforms.

Enter the AVM

While AION was originally released using the FastVM (a modified version of the EVM), the transition to releasing the Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) will attract engineers with the ability to program on this novel framework from the start, and build the next wave of decentralized applications.

The AVM will allow anyone to write a smart contract in the Java programming language and utilize the massive, mature toolset that is available for the most popular programming language in the world. The ability for a developer to walk into an existing, comfortable development environment while learning how to leverage the blockchain will open the floodgates.

There are an estimated over 6 million Android developers in the world. The ability to create a full stack, decentralized application without a traditional backend that reaches over 2 billion active Android devices is incredibly powerful. AION is laying the groundwork that empowers any person’s ideas to have an immediate reach and impact that can grow exponentially.

Aion goal as an industry should be to enable any developer to easily leverage the blockchain as another tool in their toolbox.

Building the Network Steward Productivity Ratio: An alternative analysis methodology for public networks — by Sam Pajot-Phipps.
Debugging Java Smart Contracts: Don’t debug, let your IDE do it for you — by Shidokht Hejazi. In this tutorial you will implement a simple contract, write unit tests for it, and run through a debugging process to find errors.
See also Aion University with comprehensive guides and documentation to help you start developing with Aion as quickly as possible, as well as support if you get stuck.

Social encounters

Matt Spoke is hosting SingularityU Canada webinar “Blockchains and their Impact on Social Governance” on February 27th, 2019 7:30 PM: Blockchains and their Impact on Social Governance. Register here.

Upcoming events:

Hong Kong Blockchain Week (Kesem) — March 4th-8th, 2019
Matt Spoke announced as speaker at TOKEN2049 in Hong Kong — March 13th-14th, 2019.
Aviation Week Americas Conference — April 9th-11th, 2019.
MattSpoke is one of the speakers at the 2019 SingularityU Canada Summit — April 23rd-24th, 2019 — Edmonton Convention Centre, Edmonton.
Aion Rebuild Conference, April 23rd-24th 2019: the second incarnation of the Aionex conference is coming, there will be more announcements to come on this.
BRI Blockchain Conference — April 24th-25th, 2019.
Aion at Consensus 2019 NY — May 13th-15th, 2019.

Reddit:

Weekly Community AMA — February 22 — Special Guest Alex McDougall from Bicameral Ventures on everything from “Why utility tokens are undervalued” to “What a competitor means in the crypto space… or if we have any”.

Upcoming events:

Weekly Community AMA — March 1 — Special Guest The Pocket Network Team:

Pocket Network is a decentralized solution for connecting any app with any blockchain, on any device, simply. For the AION network they delivered plugins for IOS and Android along with walkthrough videos and tutorials for education. Both teams are working to finalize a proof-of-concept IOS application “Monster Chase”, that will be fully functional and able to demonstrate the opportunity you have for mobile development with AION.

Finance

Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Etherscan.io)

If you missed the token swap deadline, there will be a process for facilitating individual swaps soon. Stay tuned and in the meantime get into the support queue.
Tokenomics:

Monetary Policy

Token Use Paper

Forum (Economics)

Aion Asset Profile by Messari

Roadmap

Right on target (Phase 1: Kilimanjaro 2018 Complete).

Phase 2: Denali

Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) Version 1

This AVM is a custom-built, lightweight, performant, and stable VM that leverages key characteristics of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), providing concurrency and robustness within a blockchain-specific context. The AVM is responsible for running applications on top of Aion. The AVM will include its own scripting language.

Aion Scripting Language

The Aion scripting language is used for writing chain logic that runs on Aion-Everest and potentially any connecting/participating network. The Aion language is compiled into AVM bytecode and executed by the AVM. The Aion language provides the following features: Defensive programming, Blockchain runtime environment, Blockchain context injection, Security.

Proof-of-Intelligence Consensus Algorithm

An economic measure to deter denial of service attacks by requiring participants, solvers in Aion-Everest, to perform artificial intelligence (AI) computation. The intent is to motivate the creation of AI-specific or specialized hardware that could be used for machine learning and neural network training in the future.

2019:

Phase 3: Everest 2019

Participating Network Bridging
The generic bridge protocol is designed to enable the atomic movement of value and data between heterogeneous networks. This will enable the development of cross-blockchain contract logic and free-floating token supplies.
Complete Validator Nomination
The Hybrid DPoS / PoI consensus mechanism aims to achieve high performance while providing a fair and decentralized validator set. This is achieved through a token staking system and partly through a novel verification algorithm based on concepts used in modern neural networks called Proof-of- Intelligence.
Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) Version 2

Partnerships and team members

New mobile SDKs for Aion dApp Development: Pocket Network launches native iOS and Android SDK’s for blockchain development.

The Pocket iOS and Android AION plugins will allow any developer to leverage the AION network using a native or cross-platform implementation, connecting to any Pocket Node with AION support. It allows for client-side Wallet management, client-side transaction signing and abstractions to a single, easy to use interface for accelerated dApp development.

Aion team has been working with Pocket Network to create early prototypes using their SDKs. This prototype will be open sourced and available in the coming weeks.

See this article which will give you an overview of AIONs vision that Pocket Network shares, as well as a description of what you can do today, and the coming weeks with the Android & IOS Plugins built for the Pocket SDKs.

To jump straight to coding, visit the AION Tutorial page.

Playlists of Video Tutorials on Building dApps on Aion with Pocket Network’s Mobile SDKs for Android and iOS:

See also Pocket Network thread about the partnership on Twitter.

Metalyfe Blockchain Browser — Mobile browsers released: First Blockchain browser running on AION Blockchain.
WandX — Development Update: Mainnet Launch of DEXs + New Native Tokens.
The THÉO Project launches Syná, a fully integrated crypto-wallet library.
“Chaion” (Aion team in China) launches public channels.
Metalyfe: MavenStamp — An Immutability-as-a-Service solution.
Aion featured in Protocol Weekly #28.Protocol Weekly is a newsletter to exclusively showcase the progress of Ethereum layer-2 protocols.
Bicameral Thesis Pt 3: Using Ecosystem Investing to Catalyze and Capture the Great White Synergy Buffalo in Bicameral Ventures blog.

Rumors

Twitter:

Matthew Spoke‏ @MattSpoke (on February 19th, 2019):

@Aion_Network (on February 23th, 2019):

New Projects And Partnerships In The BIA: Wanchain and Aion Network launched a series of new partnerships and projects this February, attesting to the core strength of the Blockchain Interoperability Alliance.

Active Reddit discussions:

A Community Heart to Heart — Everyone Please Contribute.

Why isn’t there a richlist on explorer?

Announcing Payday [PAY]: A deflationary crowd-dropped AION token with a twist. First airdrop on AION.

Social media metrics

The community is quite active discussing latest news, development, mining, token price and possible partnerships.

New Developer Subreddit — r/AIONgineering: 37 members on February 12th, 2019; 46 members on February 26th, 2019.

Twitter — Average number of retweets is 15–30 for one post. The number of followers has increased by 5 thousand over the last week.

Facebook — 10–15 likes per publication.

Reddit — threads with 2–10 comments.

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

Aion forum — discussions on mining, news, network statistics etc.