Dear Aion followers! These weeks the team worked fingers to the bone as usual! They updated the Aion Improvement Proposal (AIP) process. Check it out on Aion Github. Jeff Disher proposed new AVM Java method to allow “third-party billing” for transaction fees. There are two new AIPs for Fungible and Non-Fungible token standards.
As for the social side, Aion Founder Matt Spoke shares his thoughts on private blockchains in “Private Blockchains Were A Good Start: But They Are Not The Future” article, published in Forbes. Aion continues its mini-interview series with Ayush (Aion Developer) answering questions about ABIs and Marcus (Accounting & Finance). Aman Alam (Aion Developer Advocate) answered community questions in last week’s Reddit AMA. Mike Mason (Aion Ecosystem Development) continues to answer questions on project’s official subreddit. As for upcoming events, Matt will be speaking at JAX London about integrating blockchain in Java applications in October.
The Aion community continually grows, the ecosystem is impressive, and it continues to flourish! Aion Connect is live, and there are many projects build on Aion. Developers have been working extremely hard over the period of the last two weeks, so many updates appeared. Bicameral Ventures added Michael Casey, Jean Desgagne, Todd Finch, and Stefan Rust to its advisory board. Alex McDougall weighed in on BofA’s crypto wallet. VeriTX added Airspace Technologies to its ecosystem and its website went live.
The Aion team continues to set a new standard of accountability with a focus on long-term impact. To that end, the Aion Foundation has published its 4th Financial Report. This report provides insight into the internal operations, metrics, and strategies of the Foundation. Check it out!
And last but not least, the Aion Unity economics design will be published soon. The Engineering team is busy productionizing Aion Unity. Stay tuned!
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Showcases paused until end of November:
Aion updates the Aion Improvement Proposal (AIP) process
An AIP is an Aion Improvement Proposal. An AIP can be proposed by anyone in the Aion community. The proposal is a document which provides a concise overview to the Aion community of a new process, functionality, standard or convention. The document should be thorough, technically precise and provide a clear motivation for the proposal. Proposal are submitted by one or more authors, these authors are responsible for the creation, modifications, socialization and most importantly — consensus building around the proposal.
Check it out on Aion Github.
There are two AIPs posted on Aion GitHub for Fungible and Non-Fungible token standards. This is a great opportunity for more technical members of Aion community to give feedback.
“Pre-AIP” submission by Jeff Disher for function allowing a user (e.g. a consumer) to run a contract/tx paid for by another user (e.g. the dev).
This proposal describes a mechanism for paying to run a preserialized transaction, typically signed by another user, from within an already-running AVM transaction.
This allows for running a transaction as one user but paying for it as another.
The key idea here is that this is not known at the base protocol level: The entire system just treats this serialized transaction as generic data, except for the one API routine which accepts this input.
Additionally, a goal is to generalize this enough that it doesn’t only solve third-party billing but can become a primitive within more complex idioms, yet to be considered. However, the billing problem is the key driving factor here.
Unity Consensus — Proof-of-Concept
In this article, the team walks you through the Aion Unity Proof-of-Concept (PoC) implementation. If you haven’t heard about Aion Unity, read this “zero-to-hero” blog post.
Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) Live
At the beginning of June The AVM hard fork has officially happened!
If you, or someone you know is interested in building a dApp on the AVM, check out the Aion Docs for free comprehensive tutorials and tools to get started.
Lastly, the team has written a few AVM-related articles over the last year you might have missed so if you want a deeper dive, check out:
Social encounters
Private Blockchains Were A Good Start: But They Are Not The Future
by Matt Spoke, published in Forbes
The first email was sent in the early 1970s. Yet it would be more than 20 years before email even started to gain widespread, daily use by the public. Why?
Certainly one of the reasons was that not everyone had access to a personal computer (let alone a smartphone in their pocket). But perhaps the biggest reason the use of email remained low is because it was used primarily within private networks — not outside of them.
Universities, governmental departments, large businesses were using email — but it wasn’t until a public network — the World Wide Web — came along in the 1990s that email became widespread.
Today, we see the same pattern repeating itself with blockchain technology.
In an effort to address scalability and security challenges, businesses, governments and others have turned to private blockchains. These early adopters were right to look to blockchain to provide better coordination and verification — and many have attempted to leverage private blockchains to pilot and prove out specific uses — but their private blockchain solutions are already outdated and rapidly approaching their limits, both in terms of use case applicability, but just as importantly, choice of infrastructure.
But for anyone familiar with history, let alone how quickly our industry moves, it’s not surprising that we are starting to hit the limits of private blockchains. First, the infrastructure is just too expensive to scale, and second, it fails to address the long term scaling requirements of global business. As Paul Brody, the Blockchain Lead at EY puts it: “Blockchains will do for networks of enterprises and business ecosystems what enterprise resource planning (ERP) did for the single company.”
If that’s true — if that’s the future — then we can’t very well get there by building the same old siloed private blockchains.
For many companies and institutions, the current use case for blockchain technology is the tracking of goods and services, dictated by contracts, which requires most businesses to interact with many different entities — businesses not just within their industry.
Say you were operating an airline. Rarely do you talk to other airlines. Rather, you are trading information, services and goods back and forth between the airline, the TSA, vendors, financial institutions, air traffic control, suppliers, passengers and employees. The list goes on. If each airline has its own private blockchain, the daily exchange becomes too burdensome, too slow and too costly.
The only way to effectively address these issues is to build multi-party business applications on an open system, enabled by universal standards.
By definition, private blockchains are also not truly open. They provide control (and leverage) to a select number of individuals. A truly open blockchain network — a public one — will always beat a semi-decentralized one. Why? The more decentralized, the better — because less control over users is better — and because the network of various counter-parties can grow faster as industry participants change.
Finally, privacy and security. In an era when rarely a week goes by without news of a major data breach, the single best way to safeguard process integrity is on a public blockchain. Only a fully decentralized blockchain can protect against a single point of failure. Private blockchains are only as good as their weakest link.
Of course, the necessary shift from private to public blockchains doesn’t mean we can’t have private, encrypted data on a public blockchain. Already, protocols have been developed to achieve this with public blockchains. One, EY’s Nightfall, keeps transactions that occur over public blockchains secure and private. Others have been working on similar protocols to achieve the same security.
The more we continue to experience a constant stream of data breaches and government and corporate monitoring of communications, the more a requirement and desire for a permanent, scalable and sustainable solution will grow. To be able to deliver that solution, blockchain networks will have to follow the public path that email took more than three decades ago.
Just like e-mail, time is once again showing that for wide-scale blockchain adoption to take hold and to realize the technology’s full potential, an open application system built on public blockchains must be the future.
Aion continues its mini-interview series:
Ayush (Aion Dev) answering questions about ABIs:
- What is an ABI?
- Are there differences Ethereum ABI and Aion ABI?
- Would it be hard to create a custom ABI?
Marcus (Accounting & Finance):
Check out also Aion mini-interview series with Yao Sun answering questions about the ARRT team and Unity:
• Why is Unity more favorable than other consensus methods?
• Does Unity change anything for current AION miners?
AVM interviews with Jeff Disher:
- What does the AVM do?
- Why has nobody tried this before?
- What are the next steps for the AVM?
- Why should developers build on Aion with Java?
- Can we run any Java app on blockchain now?
Reddit:
Weekly Community AMA — Week ending August 23:
Mike Mason (Aion Ecosystem Development) answers community questions here at the end of each week.
Weekly Community AMA — August 16 — Welcome to Aman Alam (Aion Developer Advocate):
Aman Alam is a recently-hired Developer Advocate at Aion Network. In his current role, he spreads the word about building on Aion’s blockchain platform among developers around the world (particularly in the Java and web development spheres) by meeting with them, answering their questions, and helping them build successful applications on Aion.
Aman is an all around engineer and has experience with many web and mobile technologies. He also mentors young engineers and students, and has helped early startups with their mobile strategies. Here’s a video of Aman presenting to Android developers at DroidConSF at the end of last year:
Upcoming events:
October 7th-10th: Matt Spoke to speak at JAX London about integrating blockchain in Java applications.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Aion Explorer):
There is a stable slight grows in the number of token-holders these weeks.
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Aion Foundation’s Q2 2019 Transparency Report
The team continues to set a new standard of accountability with a focus on long-term impact. To that end, the Aion Foundation has published the Aion Foundation Report Q2 2019. These reports will serve the purpose of providing insight into the internal operations, metrics, and strategies of the Aion Foundation.
The Aion Foundation Report was updated on August 2nd, 2019 to add more clarity to the Aion Spending Summary.
Roadmap
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
Aion release milestones:
Q4: Unity Consensus (PoW/PoS hybrid)
Ecosystem
Bicameral Ventures adds Michael Casey, Jean Desgagne, Todd Finch, and Stefan Rust to its advisory board.
Bicameral Ventures’s latest advisory board additions.
Alex McDougall weighs in on BofA’s crypto wallet.
Stablecorp appoints Jean Desgagne as CEO.
VeriTX website goes live (currently in fundraising mode).
VeriTX adds Airspace Technologies to its ecosystem:
QCAD demoed to Pamela Draper and Magdalena Gronowska at Aion HQ :
Andrzej takes the Aion Plaque around Poland and discusses upcoming Unity Consensus:
“(Preview) Aion4j Faucet Support & Account Management” by Satya
Projects Building on Aion:
• SPRXS.io
• Digital Liquidity Factory
• THÉO (theoproject.io) (with Syná wallets)
• Agora (beta.agora.theoproject.io)
• Spiro (centrys.io/enterprise)
Community dApps:
Ecosystem builders:
See also Aion Connect
Rumors
Twitter:
Reddit discussions:
Post what you know about the AION NETWORK ecosystem.
Aion seeking technical feedback on Fungible (AIP 041) and Non-Fungible Token (AIP 040) Standards.
I would like to know about VeriTX and Veripart.
Other:
Blockgeeks to add AION as a redemption option for its learning rewards program;
The Bridge Between Blockchains: Aion (AION) Cryptocurrency Coin Review: Changelly reviews Aion.
Check out Unity Consensus Feedback Form.
Getting started with Java Smart Contract on AVM (Aion Virtual Machine) with Aion4j
Social media metrics
Aion Community Commitment: a few initiatives that will involve participation from everyone and enable two-way communication.
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
There is a slight fluctuation in the number of subscribers of Aion social media channels.
Twitter — The average number of retweets is 15–30 for one post.
Facebook — 10–15 likes per publication.
Reddit — Threads with 2–10 comments. The community is quite active discussing the latest news, development, mining, token price and possible partnerships.
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 Community — unofficial community-run Telegram channel for humor, memes, and trading discussion.
Developer Subreddit — r/AIONgineering.
Discord — Active discussions on the latest updates and mining.
Aion forum — Discussions on mining, news, network statistics etc. Popular topics:
Global Telegram Channels:
Korea — Kakao chat
Russia — @AionNetworkRU
Poland — @Aion_Poland
Spanish — @AionNetworkES
Kenya — @AionKenya
Netherlands/Belgium — @AionBenelux
India @Aion_India
See also the community-built Aion Telegram Bot and Aion Newsfeed — feed of Aion’s YouTube, Blog, and Twitter posts and project updates.
