What Is Aeon? Introduction to Aeternity
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What is Aeon Aeternity?
Aeternity is a blockchain platform designed to host smart contracts and decentralized apps with sidechains. It’s more efficient and scalable than Ethereum and is an operating system in its own right. The Aeon is the utility token that will pay for time on the virtual machine, potentially bringing supercomputing to the masses and providing a Google Play-type dApp platform. Users can earn cryptocurrency by using the environment, too, as their device becomes an Aeon coin miner.
Welcome to Aeternity
Aeternity is an interesting coin in more ways than one. Cryptocurrencies come in a variety of flavors. Some are pure currencies focused on value transfer. Others are app-based and depend on the crypto to fuel app engagement. And some, like Aeternity, are blockchain platforms for hosting smart contracts and decentralized apps.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum were revolutionary upon their release, but have already found themselves struggling to compete in a technological arms race.
Aeternity promises a more efficient and scalable smart contract solution than Ethereum, which has been notoriously bogged down by simple real-world contracts like Crypto Kitties.
But there’s not much Aeternity offers that isn’t already being addressed by Ethereum and NEO, and it has a long road ahead of it in building an ecosystem that even needs scale. The Aeon price and success of the Aeeon cryptocurrency will come down to marketing, as much as the blockchain technology.
Still, it’s at least an active crypto investor, acquiring a stake in SatoshiPay in March 2019. It also has a blockchain incubator to encrouage dApp development on its platform called Starfleet Accelerator.
Before diving into Aeternity Aeon coin, its goals, qualifications, market cap, hopes and dreams, let’s review the AE token’s pre-release performance.
Summary of Aeon (AE Token)
Aeon (Aeternity’s crypto coin) has a total coin supply of 273,685,830 AE. The peak price so far was $5.00 on May 4, 2018.
AE is mined using a Proof of Work (PoW) mining algorithm. Like in the Ethereum and NEO/GAS models, the Aeon coin is used to pay for space and computational time on a virtual machine running on another node computer on the network.
Its ICO coin sale occurred in 2017 and collected 121,212 ETH and 324 BTC during its initial ICO (equivalent to ~$5.4 million) and the mainnet launch November 27, 2018. It has been migrating tokens in the first half of 2019 to the mainnet.
It’s a pure ICO, and the team basically crowdfunded its development. The underlying technology that backs up the digital currency does have several key differences from Ethereum and NEO (though they’re quickly being addressed) and it’s so far a more finished product than your average ICO.
In addition, Aeternity uses a Cuckoo Cycle mining algorithm that improves upon the ASIC mining rig centralization problem plaguing Blockchain 2.0s like Ethereum. That could tempt people to buy Aeon for the long term.
AE is tradeable on a variety of cryptocurrency exchanges, including ZB.com, OKEx, LATOKEN, CoinBene, and Gate.io. Over $10,000,000 worth of AE is traded on a daily basis, and trading pairs include BTC, USDT, and ETH.
Scaling Ethereum’s Massive Blockchain Movement
Like NEO (and the Ethereum-compatible Plasma blockchain layer), Aeternity uses what it calls state channels to enable sidechains and off-chain computations. It’s a decentralized blockchain written in Erlang to allow non-stop, always available dapps.
Sidechains are important to a blockchain’s scalability, especially on an enterprise level, where pentabytes of data could be stored or processed at any given moment. While it may seem late to the party, Aeternity has still been in development for a long time and its decentralized-oracle model could gather a loyal userbase.
Another important differentiation is most blockchains tax a system’s CPU or GPU, but Aeternity taps into the power of RAM. With solid-state hard drives becoming more widely available, and even SD chips and thumb drives gaining more space, programs that utilize on-board memory can force the hardware arms race away from video card and ASIC rig manufacturers onto the laps of giants like Western Digital (which owns SanDisk), Seagate, Toshiba, and Samsung.
Even better, mining through memory makes mobile devices like smart phones and tablets more feasible for use. More discrete mining is a welcome relief as municipalities and local regulators crack down on crypto mining operations.
Swarm mining with mobile devices could be powered through solar on any porch or apartment balcony, even a windowsill. For mainstream acceptance to be achieved, a cryptocurrency needs to appeal to the average person in more than just tech specs.
Being open sourced and using a hybrid proof-of-work-and-stake verification model is great, but the real-world applications enabled by Aeternity are definitely interesting. That’s no guarantee for the digital currency, but it’s a solid start.
Reinventing the Wheel’s Reinvention
Aeternity’s founder and lead developer, Yanislav Malahov, built a solid team who build solid source code that can deliver on its promises. It was finally released into the wild in late 2018, and 2019 will be the real test of its market viability and use cases.
Like a game console or OS update, Aeternity’s launch needs to be accompanied by some killer dApps to really prove its worth. It’s lead developer focused on a mobile-first design in this manner too, supporting both JavaScript and React, and will launch with an incubator foundation to facilitate Aeternity dApp development.
What makes Aeternity’s blockchain so innovative is its oracle system. Oracles are typically the weak link of any blockchain, and it has checks and balances in place to maintain decentralization and trust among the network. Accuracy and honest is leveled with a prediction market in which users bet on incoming data from oracles.
Aeternity may not be an Ethereum killer, but there’s certainly no issue with both coexisting. The Aeon coin has a modest price and lofty ambitions – execution is key, however, so we won’t know how this project truly performs until at least 2020. Hodling AE for any other reason is blind gambling based on fluctuations of the entire crypto market.
The Aeternity Wikipedia page looks like marketing material with a lot of use cases laid out, so it’ll be interesting to see what type of development they spur over the next few years. Until then, it’s all speculation, guesses, and hype. Keep watching the cryptocurrency news to stay in the loop on this one.
Aeternity Summary
Aeternity has a strong backing, but it’s still in early stages of development. A strong team is in place that shows every indication it can overcome the obstacles to sustain relevance over the next decade, but its success hinges on these key factors:
- Aeternity resolves many key issues with vanilla Ethereum. However, its early release gave Ethereum leverage to develop the Plasma layer to resolve scalability issues.
- Aeternity supports sidechains and has a focus on both mobile and decentralization. This is achieved by moving mining to DRAM instead of GPU or CPU.
- Aeternity oracles provide checks and balances with a hybrid-proof predictive model. It’s deeply invested in creating and supporting a development community on its blockchain and won’t reach its full potential for another 2-5 years.
While a solid product, it launched in a crowded market. Aeternity’s team seems to understand this and is planning accordingly. Whether or not they succeed is a discussion to have in another couple years and the market cap of the Aeon cryptocurrency will tell its own story.
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