Aion: Yearly review, Aion Transwarp Conduit, Aion Kernel in RUST, Aion Network Ecosystem Map

Paradigm

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Paradigm

10 min readJan 30, 2019

Biweekly update 16th January — 30th January

This is not financial advice.

During the last two weeks, Aion Network made progress with the development, the team said that the rust client is battle tested and ready for use and they announced The Aion Transwarp Conduit — a generic blockchain interoperability framework allowing developer defined messages to be transferred between connected blockchains. As for social encounters, Jeff Disher (Aion VM lead) attended Decentralized Summit, the dates for Aion’s 2nd Annual Conference was announced (23rd-24th April 2019), and Matt Spoke named as a speaker at the 2019 SingularityU Canada Summit. Also, the team started Weekly Community AMA on Reddit: Mike Mason (Aion Ecosystem Development) answers community questions at the end of each week now. The team is also announced some new grants and bounties. However, there is also a slight decrease in the number of token-holders. But the Aion ecosystem continues to grow, Aion Connect is live, there are a lot of projects build on Aion, Unicorn Watch made an awesome Map of the Fast Expanding Aion Network Ecosystem. As for social media dynamics — there is a slight decrease in the number of subscribers of Aion media channels and chats for unclear reasons.

Development

Blockchain Interoperability — The Aion Transwarp Conduit (TWC):

The Aion Transwarp Conduit is a generic blockchain interoperability framework allowing developer defined messages to be transferred between connected blockchains. The TWC design focuses on separating message passing from application design allowing developers to focus on building their application and bridge developers on building the TWC.

Announcing the Aion Kernel in RUST: A second build of the Aion Kernel to supplement Java implementation.

Supporting multiple clients is deeply woven into the Aion core roadmap. As a result, the project has leveraged its international presence to work on a second implementation of the Aion Kernel. The team announces that the rust client is battle tested and ready for use.

The first Aion Kernel was written in Java, a high performance and well structured Java client that gave the team a great starting point to rethink and plan new implementations. As they approached thinking about a second implementation their first question was “what system level language should we choose” and “what kind of stack can achieve substantial gains in hardware requirements”. For several reasons, Rust is an ideal candidate.

Rust has an absence of data races, memory safety without the need for a garbage collection, a flexible enum system, the ability to use libraries created by other languages if you implement a C interface, and it’s a language that fits well for building scalable software. It is a high performance, static, strong-type and a multi-paradigm language. Despite the fact that it is quite new, it has shown tremendous promise it’s short life as demonstrated by robust Ethereum client developed by Parity Technologies.

The implementation of multiple kernels opens the door for diverse enhancement at the module level. It also provides a larger surface area for non-core contributors to push improvements that make their way into other kernel implementations. By evaluating the performance and security of multiple kernels, globally operated branches can achieve a greater standard than possible alone.

The rust kernel exists at a peer-to-peer network level which lowers the chance of network hang regardless of which individual implementation fails. The healthier the distribution of java and rust kernels, the more enhanced the stability, resilience and security of the network. It also provides the community an alternate option depending on their requirements or familiarity.

By leveraging built-in benchmarking systems the team sees more room to enhance the kernel, specifically in areas like IO, memory usage and communication. They also have plans to make the individual module independent and swappable. Furthermore, a light client can be spawned from the existing codebase.

The Aion Rust Kernel will continue to grow as a responsible codebase in line with the foundation’s vision and the team is excited to see the community start using it.

Here are some important links to get started:

Aion Rust Kernel.
Documentation.
Support for the Kernel.
17th January 2019: A quick update on Ledger firmware v1.5.5: The Ledger Nano S firmware 1.5.5 update does not support Aion for now, and the team is working with the Ledger team to restore support. If you have updated and need access to your Aion wallet on Ledger, you can import your seed phrase to Coinomi Wallet.
23rd January 2019: The team has updated their support system to take on more ticket volume going forward. Products that have coverage for support include the Aion Wallet, the token swap process, the dashboard and anything we maintain on Gitub.
2-Click Aion Node Launch (Includes Synced Blockchain).

Social encounters

Decentralized Summit, January 29th-30th 2019: Talk by Jeff Disher (Aion VM lead) “Why Java Smart Contracts are taking over the World”: Jeff Disher leads engineering at Aion Network, working to customize, create, and connect blockchains. Jeff specializes in building blockchain virtual machines, and will be speaking at Decentralized Summit — the all-online (free) summit for the dweb.

Upcoming events:

MattSpoke is one of the speakers at the 2019 SingularityU Canada Summit 23rd-24th April 2019 — Edmonton Convention Centre, Edmonton.
Aion Rebuild Conference, April 23rd-24th 2019.

Reddit:

Weekly Community AMA — February 1: Mike Mason (Aion Ecosystem Development) answers community questions here at the end of each week.

Weekly Community AMA — January 25.

Aion Info Hub (Jan 2019 Update).

Finance

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

Like building developer tools?

In 2019, Aion team will shift main support of their Virtual Machine to the Aion Virtual Machine (AVM). A Java VM that will unlock a new development environment and programming workflow for developers building on blockchain protocols. This shift requires a set of self-sustained tools and add-ons to popular Java development tools.

If you haven’t already read the following posts about the Aion Virtual Machine (AVM). In them, Aion team walks through why they see promise in the Java ecosystem for their Virtual Machine as well as what a smart contract in Java looks like:

The Java Development Workflow

Early on in this project, Aion team found it was going to be important to understand how Java developers currently work. They didn’t want to force developers into adopting new workflows or do things that they’re not used to already doing. So they decided to focus on integrating blockchain development into existing Java workflows. From this, they found that there were four logical groupings for development tasks:

From here, they isolated areas in the workflow (specifically development, testing, and deployment) that have blockchain tooling requirements where the developer is blocked as well as quality of life experiences that will make development easier.

The result was the following list of grants and bounties (all of which are now available).

Java Contract standards and templates
Plugins for IDEs
Command Line Interaction
Build Tool Integration

Apply to build these tools → here.

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

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 — State of the Tech — yearly review: 2018 was a massive year of technical releases for the Aion project. The team launched the Aion Network, scaled a global mining community, released comprehensive developer and users tools, and successfully completed token swap within 12 weeks using their Aion token transfer bridge.

Minutes before the launch of Kilimanjaro MainNet. Source: Aion blog.

Partnerships and team members

Aion Connect is live.
Navdeep Bains, Canadian Minister of Innovation Science and Economic Development has released his Narwhals of 2019 list. (They’re companies that have potential to make it big on the world stage) — Aion makes the list.
CHAINLINK made a new external adapter for AION Network.
Rootstock Team Gives Credit to Aion Team for Java-based AVM Achievements (Aion Virtual Machine).
MavenNet team shows MavenStamp live on Metalyfe. See also an article Protect your privacy with Metalyfe in Metalyfe blog.
Tournaments in clash app.

Matthew Spoke‏ @MattSpoke (on January 16th 2019): A few ppl in the @Aion_Network office playing @ClashRoyale using the @ClanPlayApp tournament dApp built on $Aion. Very cool experience.

AI, Blockchain, Lizard Brain and how we consume — by Alex McDougall, CIO & co-founder of Bicameral Ventures.
Updates: WandX DEX and the Upcoming Mainnet Release.
Aion Roulette live on test net: Win AION (testnet) by betting on a lucky animal.
Limited-time pilot of ClashRoyale tourneys on ClanPlay — Winners earn AION.
James Allen Regenor (fmr. Moog transformative tech director, Fr8 Chief Solutions Officer) joins MavenNet team.
Alex McDougall of Bicameral Ventures on the CES2019 panel “How Blockchain is Remaking the Media/Entertainment Business”: video.
Mapping the Fast Expanding Aion Network Ecosystem (January 2019 Update) by Unicorn Watch.

Projects Building on Aion:

• Metalyfe (metalyfe.com) | @metalyfe

• Velocia (velocia.io)

• VeriTransfer (veritransfer.io)

• WandX (wandx.co) | @wandxapp

• ClanPlay (clan-play.com) | @ggmarketplace

• Pocket network (pokt.network) | @POKTnetwork

• WinMiner (winminer.com) | @teamwinminer

• DeepDefence (deepdefence.net) | @deepdefence

• RisePic (risepic.com)

• SPRXS (sprxs.io)

• Agora (beta.agora.theoproject.io)

• THÉO (theoproject.io)

• Spiro (centrys.io/enterprise)

• Vault Wallet (vaultwallet.io)

• Cranberry (Aionconnect.com)

• MatrixOne (mat.one)

• Titan Suite (titan-suite.com)

• AionPay (Aionconnect.com) • BWF (bondwithfriends.com) • AionRoulette (aion-roulette.netlify.com)

• ForTheRecord (aion-for-the-record.herokuapp.com)

• Get Aiwa wallet & DApp interaction tool for Aion: (getaiwa.com)

List of AION Mining pools with live stats & hashrate distribution.

Rumors

Twitter:

Other:

AION Wallet and Dashboard Survey.

Aion’s Conduit for Blockchain Interoperability by Joseph P. DiPasquale.

Social media metrics

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

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.