A significant event for the team and the whole Aion community — the Aion Rebuild Conference — the second incarnation of the Aionex conference took place last week in Toronto! There were a lot of notable speakers from such projects as Web3, Ethereum, The Atlantic, Algorand, Bitcoin, Messari, IBM, The Former Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and more. At the conference the team announced a few milestones and exciting updates for developers. They released the ARRT (Aion Research and Roadmap Team) draft Unity white paper. The paper explains in technical detail the approach to implement Unity, a combination PoW and PoS consensus algorithm. It is the first hybrid consensus system that maintains collusion-resistance on a smart contract blockchain! Watch the videos from the event on official Aion Youtube channel! The Aion Foundation keeps providing transparency; they released its quarterly report for Q1 2019 to provide the community with insight into Aion internal operations and financial position. The ecosystem is impressive and it continues to flourish. Aion Connect is live, and there are a lot of projects build on Aion. Developers have been working extremely hard over the period of the last two weeks so many updates on ecosystem projects appeared in the media landscape. August launches Kokun developer tool suite (feat. AionPay). Colonel James Regenor talked about VeriTX and how blockchain is disrupting supply chain and logistics in the weekly Reddit AMA. PocketID launched mobile SDKs for its “Facebook login for crypto. New edition of “Bicameral Bits” discusses ecosystem partner developments. Velocia made a great pitch at Techstars TO Demo Day after being featured in Forbes and WEF, and before their mobility platform launches in Miami this month. Clan-Play will be running live tourneys with big Aion prizes at Consensus 2019 and CESasia, Fortnite and PUBG integrations are projected in the coming month or so. Vault Wallet team is working with ClanPlay and signed a major savings app client. Mike Mason continues to answer community questions at Weekly Community AMAs on Aion official subreddit at the end of each week. The community constantly grows. April 25th, 2019 is the 1 year anniversary of the Aion going live and mining it’s first block! What an incredible year, and the next 6 months will be even more interesting with Aion migration to AVM (Java-based system) and Unity consensus (hybrid PoW & PoS)! Stay tuned for Aion Network updates in the coming weeks!
Development
Unity Consensus Draft Paper Published:
Aion released the ARRT (Aion Research and Roadmap Team) draft Unity white paper. The paper explains in technical detail the approach to implement Unity, a combination Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.
The goals they’re looking to achieve with Unity are:
- Increase the security of the network by introducing economic security via Proof-of-Stake
- Adaptable to network size and topology
- Lower barrier of entry to participate in network security via staking
- Represent a progression in Aion, simple to implement
- Retain probability distribution introduced in PoW (see below)
The initial research has led the team to be confident that Unity will improve the security of the Aion network while simultaneously improving the through-put capability. The ARRT team is still working on fork selections and slashing mechanisms but they’re very excited to have Unity on their road map.
For the full Unity draft white paper PDF click here
For a thoughtful breakdown of how they got here, read Yao Sun’s announcement:
Over at the ARRT team at Aion have been grovelling over some definitions regarding blockchains. This time the debate occurred while they were seeking designs for a Proof-of-Stake implementation approach. It starts with a very simple question, what is a blockchain? What traits and attributes must a network contain to warrant this definition? With the varying implementations and security assumptions made by different networks nowadays, it becomes difficult for us to speak clearly to the defining trait of these networks. In fact, everyone in the team has varying opinions on how they should behave.
Are they to believe it is the immutability of the ledger? If so they should opt for more traditional BFT designs that favour finality and immutability. Or rather is it the probabilistic finality that Nakamoto Consensus offers, which favours a highly available network over consistency and immutability? Within the team, there was no clear agreement. Nonetheless, they could be guided by their intuition: that the design of the system should try to adhere to the environment it operates in.
The team’s previous experiences taught them that consistency favouring network protocols demands increased communication complexity, and may be incongruent with the inconsistent channels that existed between nodes. This is especially exacerbated if one chooses to enable random sampling and indirect links between nodes through gossip protocols.
Another point of view they had was a focus on the degradation of the protocol. This is best illustrated by a question one of the author’s colleagues asked:
What happens when no one participates?
The team wanted to build something that degrades in a manner consistent with expectations, changes in the network are reflected eventually by changes in the protocol, and a stable equilibrium is at some point reached without external assistance. The system should scale to handle the capacity of users it encounters, not make any demands on a minimal or maximal set. From here, they had clear goals on what they wanted to achieve with Unity:
- Increase the security of the network by introducing economic security via Proof-of-Stake.
- Adaptable to network size and topology.
- Lower barrier of entry to participate in network security via staking.
- Represent a progression in Aion, simple to implement.
- Retain probability distribution introduced in PoW.
The main property they want to preserve from the traditional PoW protocol is that the function of network security is linked to the relative “power” of the adversary as opposed to a function of the network . For Proof-of-Work that it would be linked to hash power.
And that led us to Unity.
Unity
At its core, Unity removes direct ties between chain weight and a singular resource. Instead, they abstract the idea of chain weight and tie it to an intermediate unit that consolidates both the computational power of miners on the network, as well as the relative stake of the active staking set on the network. This mostly relies on changes to the fork selection rule to account for both hash and staking power.
The team makes no additional assumptions about the network itself and introduce a new state mapping that represents the amount of active stake an address currently holds. Additionally, no assumptions about the structure of the blockchain are made, PoW and PoS blocks are mined and created by miners and stakers respectively, and arrive in random order. In this schema, Proof-of-Work remains the same. It is the game of deriving a successful solution against some difficulty parameter that is being dynamically adjusted to adhere to some pre-determined network configuration. One of the challenges the team faces here is in experimenting with different adjustment algorithms and finding a fit.
On the other side, they adopt a protocol that uses private random number generation for a Proof-of-Stake process that emulates the stochastic process of PoW. This is done by having each staker generate a unified random variable that remains private until the publishing of the block. This unified random variable is applied to a function that biases “winning” the block proportional to their stake. The result is a randomly generated ranked list at each new block, with the winner unknown until the result is published. This preserves the unpredictability property similar to PoW. To prevent the network from being flooded by every staker publishing, the selection of stakers eligible to publish grows by the second. This mechanism provides similar properties and emulates a PoW setup, where the luckiest account wins the block. Here, the luckiest account is explicitly chosen by the protocol. We can also see from this emulation that similar to PoW, there must be a dynamic parameter to be adjusted by the network as active stake fluctuates. Similar to PoW, this difficulty parameter shifts in responses to change in stake .
The team’s simulation results indicate that the probability distribution of this protocol is also an exponential distribution.
The initial results seem promising, both PoW and PoS systems depict a roughly exponential distribution inferring that both are Poisson processes as both processes roughly adhere to the exponential distribution in block time deltas. By combining the two, the end result the team obtains is yet still a Poisson process. Assuming that the fork selection rule holds, they obtain a blockchain:
- Whose security derives from both PoW and PoS. Making the network resilient to attackers without sufficient investments in both.
- That maintains the randomness from PoW systems and can be argued to be still close to a Poisson process.
- Scales well regardless of the size of the network.
- Has a low barrier to entry, as they don’t require any delegation, and the barrier to entry on both sides is minimal.
In conclusion, the team sets out with a specific goal at hand primarily influenced by the teams previous experience with different consensus protocols. While the initial groundwork is now done on Unity, the team is working hard on simulations to further verify their results in more realistic settings and possibly working on a PoC TestNet running Unity. There is still work to be done on fork selection and slashing mechanisms for Unity, something they touch upon more in the draft paper available here. Once they’re comfortable with the results, they will immediately shift gears to merge Unity into its own TestNet and make it available for you to play with.
Social encounters
These weeks events:
- Aion Rebuild Conference, April 23rd-24th, 2019, Toronto Reference Library: The second incarnation of the Aionex conference. Check out Rebuild Conference Twitter.
- Matt Spoke was one of the speakers at the 2019 SingularityU Canada Summit — April 23rd-24th, 2019 — Edmonton Convention Centre, Edmonton.
- Aion Founders Matt Spoke and Kesem Frank was speaking at Blockchain Revolution Global, April 24th-25th, 2019 in Toronto.
Videos:
Matt’s update for the Month — May 3rd:
Aion Founder Matt Spoke shares updates on Unity paper and AVM mainnet launch.
Jennifer, PM for Rebuild, shares her thoughts capturing the success of the first Rebuild Conference.
Videos from Aion Rebuild Conference:
Announcing Unity Hybrid Consensus and the Aion Virtual Machine Timeline and Support: At REBUILD Conference 2019, the Aion Foundation announced the path toward next-gen consensus for the Public Network and dates and details around the Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) on Mainnet.
Matt Spoke — What it Mean to Rebuild the Internet: Bitcoin and blockchains are not only about 1000x returns and lambos. They represent an architectural shift in how we govern our society. The shift which is much needed. Matt Spoke, CEO and founder of AION explains why the web3 is needed, explains the history of the internet, what web 1 and 2 were all about, and articulates the intentions behind web 3.
Panel 1 — How Enterprises View Blockchain (Deloitte, IBM, EEA, Web 3): The movement of web 3 technologies is attracting some very big fish. Understand how enterprises are thinking about blockchain and crypto by hearing from individuals at the head of this movement from organizations like IBM, Deloitte, EEA, and Web 3 Labs.
Panel 2 — How to Solve the Biggest Issues Facing Blockchain Adoption: Hear from researchers, open-source contributors and engineers that are working from the front-lines on the biggest issues facing blockchain technology from being able to be the backbone infrastructure for mainstream applications. Individuals that are present on the panel are from organizations such as AION, Chainsafe, and Microsoft.
Panel 3 — Building Web 3.0: Without a proper foundation, a house cannot stand. At the moment, web3 and blockchains are building that foundation for the future decentralized applications to be able to function properly. Listen to individuals that are building that foundation from companies like AION, Nodesmith, Pocketnetwork, and Blockdaemon.
Panel 4 — Side Effects of Monopolies Controlling the Internet: Apple and Google have monopolized app distribution and now have the power to cut off any viable competitors or put individuals out of business by simply refusing to put them on their platform or launching a competitor and having it in the spotlight. This panel consists of serial entrepreneurs and tech innovators that have lots of experience with app development and interactions between these monopolies. They have much to say about them.
Panel 5 — Business Models for Dapps: The first applications that were developed on the internet had no way of monetizing the content they produced and usually resulted in giving away products absolutely for free. It was not too long before advertisers noticed a ripe, new industry, perfect for exploiting. Before we knew it, the web was marinated in ads and it was the only viable business model for application on the web. The web3 movement challenges that belief. Hear the panel of industry experts and veterans that have built, consulted and funded new businesses in the blockchain space. In order for us not to repeat the same mistake that happened during the development of the web, we need to come up with alternative businesses models that would be able to monetize on the content that is produced.
What new and innovative business models are we going to see in the future?
Panel 6 — How to Fund Web 3: During the ICO boom, it seemed like it was the wild west, where you could throw your money anywhere and it would double in days. But since the hype has died down significantly, much more caution has been given when approaching this new and yet unknown industry. Hear from the key investors and builders of this new technology and understand how they approach the untamed industry.
Panel 7 — The Governance of Blockchain Protocols: Hear from individuals responsible for building the projects that are the backbone of decentralization applications and web 3 — Cosmos, AION, Polkadot and Ethereum. Understand their shared vision and ambition that they have for the future of the better web.
Kesem Frank — Building and Investing into Blockchain: Many see blockchain and the crypto industry simply as a speculative tool that goes up and down like a rollercoaster ride. Kesem Frank, the co-founder of NUCO, then AION, Mavennet, and his new fund — Bicameral Ventures, cuts through the fog of what blockchain is all about and talks on its potential having realized it when he was working as a consultant for Deloitte. Understand how Kesem’s vies on this industry as an investment tool and as something that many valuable businesses will utilize in the near future.
Sascha Darius Mojtahedi — Bunz, and the future principles of the internet: What started out as a simple facebook group for trading and exchanging things, has turned into an entire community and one of the leading web 3 projects with thousands of people using this new way of exchange. This leading project of the web 3 movement is called Bunz.
Hear Sascha, one of the founders of Bunz, talk about the principles behind web 3 technologies, the lessons learned from previous technological innovations and what kind of an outlook we should have on the future of this technological movement.
Robert McChesney — the History of the Internet and it’s Corporate Owners: Robert McChesney examines some of the biggest issues facing our society in the 21st century. The large internet monopolies are controlling the market, with surveillance and lack of privacy becoming “the gold standard for making making. Having all of the information about all of us is central to their business model.” Robert explains how this is not only a threat to our rights, but to democracy. With us having a third of the number of working journalists today as we did twenty five years ago on per capita basis. Robert dives into explaining how journalists are a key component to core democratic theory and how due to the current state of the web, there is no signs of them improving. Unless we solve these issues soon, with the technologies on the rise like AI, and robotics, “inequality today will look like a golden age of equality 10 or 20 years down the road.”
Watch Robert McChesney to understand key issues in our society today and what Web 3.0 is working towards solving them.
Ann Cavoukian — embedding privacy into the infrastructure of our society: Both of the private and public sectors are incentivized to extract as much data as they can out of you. Data has become the new oil of the 21st century, and massive surveillance that has been used in the process of extracting it has resulted in lack of privacy and trust. Three term privacy commissioner of Ontario, Ryerson university professor and author of multiple academic works including ‘privacy by design’, Ann Cavoukian speaks about the importance of imbedding privacy into the design of organizations and products and services that they provide.
Alex Tapscott — What is Blockchain and Why it Matters: Alex Tapscott is the author of a popular book — blockchain revolution and the co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute in Toronto. He is a strong evangelist of blockchain technology and is able to articulate it in a certain way that enables everybody to understand it’s significance.
Watch the video to understand the technology behind Bitcoin and how it can change so much more than just the way we transact currency online.
Ethan Buchman — Philosophical Perspective on the Engineering of Web 3: Ethan Buchman is the founder Cosmos, one of the most prominent blockchain protocols that is focused on tackling the biggest challenges that blockchains have today — interoperability, and scalability. Among many other things.
Ethan Buchman talks about what kind of infrastructure we need in order to enable web 3 to function properly with an unique take from a philosophical perspective mixed with a technical one.
Peter Kieltyka — Blockchain for Gaming: Blockchain technology has already challenged our beliefs about what money really is, now it is challenging us to think what gaming is all about. With the power of being able to transact value on the web and not rely on vast intermediaries, the experience of gaming might be completely different in the future. Peter Kieltyka, the founder of Horizon Games and he is focused on changing the future for gaming for the better. Listen to Peter talk about vast technologies coming from blockchains that could change the way the world play’s online.
Tanner Mirrlees — What Shapes the Digital Age and it’s Problems: Hear an academics perspective on the flaws about the current digital age. While many of rebuilds conference speakers have been engineers, entrepreneurs and investors, Tanner Mirrlees is a professor at the Ontario Tech University. Understand his take on what is needed for the web to become sustainable and for the current problems to be solved.
Dr Cathy Barrera — Blockchain Governance 101: How do we govern something that is decentralized and doesn’t have any hierarchy. Blockchain comes with many opportunities but with them brings many challenges, one of which being how does a network supposed to govern itself and the parties interacting with it. Dr. Cathy Barrera is the founding partner at Prysm Cryptoeconomic group which focuses their research and effort in understanding what does an optimal blockchain network look like and how does it act. Watch her talk at Rebuild to understand one of the top questions facing the blockchain revolution.
Ryan Zurrer — Understanding Web 3: We need web 3 because web 2 failed us. With web 3, users would be able to control their own privacy, sovereign identity, financial accounts and destiny. Understand the progressing history of the web and how we ended up with one that controls majority of our personal data and in which surveillance has become the golden business model for making money. Ryan Zurrer, director of web3 foundation, walks us through the history of the web, explains the flaws of web 2 and points to blockchain technology as the solution to maintain our sovereignty.
Kevin Owocki — Gitcoin and the Power of Open-Source: Understanding how open-source works and its potential from Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin — a project which empowers open-source developers by paying them with Gitcoin crypto for completing various tasks.
Ryan Selkis — Investment Infrastructure of Blockchains: Ryan Selkis, the co-founder of Messari and former Consensys employee, is talking about building the necessary infrastructure that needs to exist in order for Web3 to function.
Gregory Markou — How To Contribute to Web3’s Development: Gregory Markou is VP of Engineering at Chainsafe.
Ali Sharif — A Researchers Explanation for Blockchain.
Upcoming events:
- Aion at Consensus 2019 NY — May 13th-15th, 2019.
Reddit:
- Weekly Community AMA — April 26: Mike Mason (Aion Ecosystem Development) answers community questions here at the end of each week.
- Weekly Community AMA — May 3 — Special Guest Colonel James Allen Regenor (via video).
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Aion Explorer):
Aion Foundation Report Q1 2019 — April 30th, 2019:
Aion continues to set a new standard of accountability with a focus on long-term impact. To that end, the Aion Foundation has to publish the Aion Foundation Report Q1 2019. These reports will serve the purpose of providing insight into the internal operations, metrics, and strategies of the Aion Foundation.
- Tokenomics:
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
See also Aion roadmap release schedule (tentative):
- A Methodology for Roadmapping Public Blockchain Networks: publication in official Aion blog.
Aion team splits the scope of projects within the blockchain space between:
- Tinkerers: Those that innovate use-cases on top of a blockchain platform, using existing tools that are available.
- Tool Builders: Those that seek to expand the toolbox.
The best roadmaps are ones from projects that have a statistically viable sample to draw requirements from, ones that must be diligent and organized about roadmaps for their impact to downstream dependencies. Aion team found similarities within roadmaps for these projects that convinced them of the effectiveness:
- Thematic Consistency
- A Logical Breakdown
- Clarity of content
In the coming weeks Aion will be releasing their roadmap to the public with this format as their guide. The roadmap takes into account work being undertaken across the Foundation from research, to production development, to ecosystem funding, documentation and more. From all the things they looked at, arguably the most important was “Recommendations”, a roadmap feature they only saw from the React project.
Partnerships and team members
- You can see the list of Aion partnerships on Aion Connect.
Ecosystem
PocketID aims to introduce dApps to the masses by making signing up for mobile dApps less tedious. The PocketID SDK will help developers integrate an easy new user on-boarding flow into their mobile dApps. Developers can also use the PocketID app to authorize transactions through the built-in smart contracts integration. The SDK is currently supported on dApps utilizing the Aion Protocol.
The PocketID Android SDK allows developers to make their decentralized mobile apps more accessible for everyday users. They will achieve this by introducing a no-frills, simple to use signup flow that everyday users are already familiar with, eliminating the need to jump through hoops to use a dApp. Simply put, PocketID is the ‘Facebook login’ for dApps.
PocketID is scheduled to launch the iOS SDK and wallet app in May 2019.
You can find their documentation and tutorials here to get started.
- Kokun — A Toolbox for Blockchain Developers: Kokun, a toolbox for blockchain developers. August’s first tool is an embeddable widget that allows users to sign transactions without needing to download anything.
- Bicameral Bits Continues to Be Back — April 2019.
- Velocia working with Mayor of Miami, Florida Int Univ & Miami Dade County to launch in Miami this month.
- Cranberry’s architecture, a crash course to dApp development with Aion by August.
- Techstars Toronto Demo Day 2019: Singularity University CoFounder Salim Ismail talking to Mayors & Heads of State to solve traffic problems (video, starts at 48m50s).
- VivoPlay now a MavenNet client.
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.
And new tutorials:
- Maven: Docs, Installing Maven, Deploying smart contracts.
- Idea: Docs.
Rumors
Twitter:
Active Reddit discussions:
Vote for Mavennets submission — Community Help Needed.
Velocia launching in Miami next month.
Other:
20 Blockchain Projects With the Most Dev Activity on Github — April, 2019: Aion listed in ConsenSys’s top 20 projects by developer activity.
Why Canada is at the Forefront of the Blockchain Sector? on Open Ledger Info: Aion is certainly one reason.
Social media metrics
There is a slight fluctuation in the number of subscribers of Aion social media channels.
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 community is quite active discussing 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 is the new unofficial community-run Telegram channel for humor, memes, and trading discussion.
New Developer Subreddit — r/AIONgineering.
Discord — Active discussions on the latest updates and mining.
Aion forum — Discussions on mining, news, network statistics etc. Popular topics
- Missing coins to my wallet
- Aion Bridge Stats
- Aion bridge user experience
- Any way to suppress “WARN P2P [p2p-tcp]: tcp-connect-peer pass max-active-nodes”?
- 亚洲 Aion 采矿服务器 — Glorypool.io
Top:
- SmartMiner EOL, Author call switching to EWBF miner.
- Aion network statistics.
- Aion Beta Testnet Rewards.
- Aion Token Bridge — Alpha Version Megathread.
- How to — build CUDA-based aionminer on Ubuntu 16.04.
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.
