What Is Æternity?

Æternity is a next-level, brand new blockchain technology in the making, with many features that tackle current issues of blockchain systems in an elegant way.

One can learn more about æternity’s blockchain technology by looking at the whitepaper. Going through it is the best way to understand æternity’s technology design.

Interested to see some action? Access our Twitch account to look at our live coding sessions. We also have a public Gitter chat. More channels coming soon!

æternity’s first testnet is now online. You can use it in order to check out some of its features. You can create an account and start mining AE right away. Start interacting with æternity by visiting GitHub.

AE are the access tokens to the æternity blockchain and act as a unit of account for the resources spent on æternity. AE are the energy (or “crypto-fuel”) used to power any application implemented on the platform. Every action (and even inaction) on the æternity platform costs something, even if only fractions of cents.

AE are the fuel for the new types of trustless apps that will be be enabled. For more information regarding applications, consult the æternity whitepaper, visit the website or continue reading this FAQ.

Æternity enables a high transaction throughput. Broadly speaking, any type of application that requires high transactional speed will run smoothly on æternity. Here are some of those:

Manifold factors contribute to æternity’s uniqueness! One major advantage of æternity smart contracts is the fact that they are created off-chain. This allows to — once created — to interact with other participating parties blazingly fast and has important privacy implications. The users’ interactions stay off-chain and are kept secure. Only in cases of disagreement, a transaction will be submitted on-chain. The æternity blockchain will function as a crypto-court.

Furthermore, there is no limit to the volume of smart contracts that can be processed per second, since æternity smart contracts don’t share state, they can be processed in parallel.

In comparison to ‘legacy’ Ethereum, we switched from being goto-based to being function-based. Thus, it is a lot simpler to reason about and write more secure smart contract code.

We are building a state-of-the-art virtual machine for secure and efficient blockchain computations. For example, we have added a tool for ‘merklizing’ the code, so that the users only publish the portion of code that actually gets executed.

æternity’s smart contracts can be massive, gigabytes to terabytes in volume, not a problem — as long as the part that gets executed is relatively small.

The primary reason for using Ethereum-created tokens for the token sale is that æternity is not functional yet. Once æternity launches, tokens will exist on æternity. However even if æternity did exist, it wouldn’t give us the ability to do a decentralized token sale — Ethereum is great for this type of use-cases, that require a fully public index of things (e.g. tokens, …). æternity is focusing on scalable, real-world uses-cases. Most of those don’t require data to be openly shared all of the time.

We will provide a rock-solid technology to build on, but that wouldn’t be enough if it wasn’t based on a legally safe foundation. æternity is incorporated in Liechtenstein and is in regular contact with regulators to keep track of the project’s legal status. The team includes a legal adviser and makes use of additional legal consultancy on an ad-hoc basis.

A wallet is a piece of software that is used to interact with æternity. It allows you to make accounts and channels. It will allow users to make channel contracts, to bet, to play games, to buy/sell assets, provides identity, communicate with other users, etc.

Some nodes will be providing liquidity to the lightning network. They will have lots of channels with lots of people, so if you make a channel with them, you will be able to establish state channel contracts with many users. Using a channel contract through such a node will involve a fee.

Some nodes will run trustless exchanges for any asset. They will also collect transaction fees. We envision nodes that let people use state channels to play games like Go, Monopoly, slot machines, or poker. Either single player, or with your friends, or with strangers. æternity enables trustless financial applications. They are not necessarily decentralized. Anyone can start a “centralized server” and use our software to create trustless financial tools.

There can be ‘servers/nodes’ which you can use to invest in stocks, derivatives or metals. You can gamble at sports in a fully trustless and efficient way. Other nodes can specialize in recycling old accounts. There is a fee for having an account open. If the account runs out of money, anyone will be able to delete it and get a small reward.

Some nodes will just run trading software. They will buy and sell assets offered by market makers in order to make a profit. Some nodes will specialize in participation in prediction markets, running the consensus mechanism. This will be profitable because transaction fees are the initial liquidity in these markets.

The first testnet is now ready! We will be adding more features all the time. Start interacting with æternity by visiting GitHub.

Your feedback will be highly appreciated! Join our public chat on Gitter.

You can also get in touch with us through our Facebook page, Twitter profile, LinkedIn account, Bitcointalk post and our subreddit.

A detailed roadmap is also in the making. You can get an update on this by subscribing to our newsletter.

Getting Started With Æternity

Æternity is a new blockchain technology, designed to deliver unmatched efficiency, transparent governance and global scalability.

Why are state channels an essential breakthrough?

A network of state channels enables the exchange of value with anybody on the world in trustless way. Participants interact privately with each other. Businesses have their records off-chain and not in public. Participants have infinite instant transactions, limited only by the speed of light. Participants can handle use cases that require high volume of transactions.

How can an oracle be helpful?

What if the fulfillment of a smart contract depends on weather conditions or other public information? The oracle can provide tamper-proof public data and execute accordingly to it. Election results, asset prices like gold, weather conditions play a crucial role for many business applications. With other blockchains an oracle is typically a single-point of failure, therefore bad for decentralization. æternity’s oracles are decentralized.

How does consensus work?

Consensus is achieved via a novel hybrid Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm. The "Cuckoo Cycle" PoW is more power-efficient and indirectly useful, as it encourages the development of better random access memory (DRAM) chips. The best part is that even smartphones can efficiently mine new tokens, achieving unparalleled decentralization. Proof-of-Stake is implemented via on-chain prediction markets, see governance.

How does unique governance work?

Science has proven the use of prediction markets to aggregate information. In æternity on-chain prediction markets project the information available to the network to one single number between 0 and 1. This number is used to signal to the miners which version of the blockchain to mine on. This governance mechanism is also used to check the oracles for correctness. Further, certain blockchain variables (price of computation, blocksize...) will be determined by this mechanism.

Privacy - For many business applications it's crucial to have their transactions not recorded in public. Smart contracts touch the blockchain only in case of disagreement, acting like a self-arbitrating crypto court.

Security - State-of-the-art cryptographic datastructures and unparalleled decentralization provide efficiency and eliminate every single-point-of-failure.

Low Cost - Via leveraging state channels the default way to run smart contracts, æternity becomes the most efficient Turing-complete blockchain and thus enables new forms of monetization via it's low cost transactions.

The Æternity Ecosystem

Incubator Foundation - æternity will spin off a foundation to support open-source developers, entrepreneurs and young businesses which build their projects on æternity.

Adoption - æternity puts an emphasis on web-browser integration and a mobile-first approach to bring blockchain technology to the next level of adoption.

Education - On the technical side æternity will provide developer workshops and tutorials to make the technology easily accessible. æternity supports interested businesses and individuals to find a fit for their use case.

Establishment - æternity blockchain is bootstraped by aeternity establishment and incorporated in the Principality of Liechtenstein. Ongoing communication with respective regulatory institutions is key to keep blockchain technology and the æternity project in legally safe waters.

æpps - æternity will deliver essential open-source æpps with the launch of the platform. This brings use to the blockchain from day one. Read the æternity whitepaper to find out more about the applications.

Meetups and Conferences - We will be organizing meetups and conferences for the community in countries around the world. 你好 Hallå Здравствуйте Hola! こんにちは

Research & Academia - æternity is continuously researching the newest technological standards and continuously expanding our cooperations with international research institutions to keep the technology safe and up to date. Official partnerships to be announced soon.

Partnerships - æternity is bootstrapping partnerships in different sectors to bring blockchain technology into real world use.

Roadmap

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Æternity Enables Numerous Use Cases

Information Markets - Latest efforts within the field have seen many developers create decentralized prediction markets which combine the best efforts of what academics call a workable theory, in order to facilitate decision making and pointing outright where the markets heads to.

The technology allows prediction market smart contracts right out of the box. From simple gambling, up to monetized weather predictions and event contracts.

Crowdfunding Projects - How about crowdfunding using dominant assurance contracts? These specific smart contracts can be used to raise money for your projects and, at the same time, secure contributors against failure. If a project is unsuccessful, all participants get their contributions back.

Using an oracle, æternity can additionally ensure that the provider of the good or service only gets paid after delivery.

Instant Video Game Rewards - In the blockchain ecosystem gaming is a huge, steadily growing industry. The advantages are obvious. Users are in full control of their in-game transactions, which means fees are kept to a minimum with no intermediaries. A fraud resistant network and irreversible transactions provided by blockchain technology deliver trustless and secure interactions.

From simple games to high-end eSports titles, with æternity, users can rely on secure and instant transactions, sit back, and enjoy their gameplay.

Decentralized Fintech - Infinite scalability, instant payment functionality and Oracle prediction enable us to automate financial transactions, which involve large amounts of parameters with any number of concurrent users.

This allows for new ways to fund projects or even governments. A system, in which the funding is only unlocked upon completion of one or more selected events.

Additionally, funds can be unlocked, only if the outcome, which is to be reached with the funding, is predicted favorable by the Oracle.

Trustless Exchanges - The ability to exchange tokens is an essential part of a thriving ecosystem, providing for efficient cooperation and transfer between different blockchain projects.

aeternity allows for cross-chain, trustless atomic swaps, for example between aeons and Bitcoin as well as many other assets.

Micro & Nano Payments - The payments market is highly competitive and, at the same time, offers countless innovation opportunities for streamlining today’s tangled and ineffective ecosystem.

æternity's unique way of handling transactions brings this to the next level by handling payments off-chain via state channels. Payments go through instantly, while retaining your privacy. You heard that right, instantly!

Imagine banking for the unbanked, content monetization, paid API calls, decentralized live video streaming and a lot more.

Blockchain Technology Architecture

INDUSTRIAL GRADE CODE BASE - Our core blockchain code is written in Erlang, which makes it easy to write distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time and highly available non-stop applications. Erlang is the perfect choice to write a blockchain from scratch allowing to achieve superior operational stability and performance.

AE TOKEN - AE are the access tokens to the æternity network and act as a unit of account for the resources spent on æternity. Furthermore, AE tokens are the energy for any application implemented on the platform. The initial amount of AE for the genesis block will be determined by a smart contract on Ethereum.

ORACLES - A crucial feature for most contracts, whether encoded as text or as code, is the ability to refer to values from the environment. The æternity Oracle Machine provides real-world data to the blockchain. Each user can ask questions about the environment. Everybody can answer. The consensus mechanism comes into play in case of disagreement.

ACCOUNTS & IDENTITY - æternity's accounts are permission-less, but still allow customization via schema.org's semantic web scheme. Create and own your identity on the æternity network - then use it everywhere on the web!

BLOCKCHAIN NETWORKS - æternity technology is free to use and easy to incorporate. ​ MIT-licensed modules will allow easy implementation in blockchain consortiums and will enable free and open access for developers to be able to build on the æternity platform. Cross-chain atomic swaps do the rest.

SMART CONTRACTS - State channels enable highly scalable, trustless transactions of value and purely functional, easily verifiable turing-complete smart contracts. State channels effortlessly support an immense throughput of transactions. The execution as well as settlement happens off-chain. In other words: They are one-to-one- sidechains, where the blockchain acts as a public crypto court.

NAMES (DNS) - In the vein of Aaron Swartz’ work and Namecoin, æternity features an easy to use name system, that is both decentralized and secure, while still supporting human-friendly, memorable names. The blockchain’s state includes a mapping from unique human-friendly strings to fixed-size byte arrays, which are individually customizable.

How To Get A Æternity Wallet?

Ae tokens are available on the digital exchanges like- Mercatox, EtherDelta and HitBTC. However, you can not transfer Aeternity coin yet. But you can access it through Etherium. There are some wallets in which you can store AE tokens, you can participate through- using Bitcoin (BTC).

Users can download the code, compile and run a test version of the latest software on Ubuntu, an open source operating system. Users also need Erlang, a concurrent, general-purpose, functional programming language, in addition to other libraries.

“We will eventually present a polished, highly scalable blockchain architecture with a consensus mechanism, which is also used to check the oracle,” said Zack Hess, Aeternity’s technical lead.

Hess said an oracle, in the context of a blockchain, is a mechanism to reveal facts about the physical world, and can be a function of the blockchain.

“For example, a blockchain can use its oracle to find out the results of a football game or who won an election,” he said. “Aeternity’s oracle will not only be decentralized, but very efficient and cost-effective because it avoids layering one consensus mechanism on top of another.”

The testnet will provide a proof-of-work model of consensus. The “mainnet” platform will be based on a hybrid, proof-of-stake and proof-of-work consensus mechanism. The objective of the test phase is to demonstrate the function of state channels, according to Hess.

Proof-of-stake and proof-of-work are algorithms that help govern the state and proper order of blockchains.

The mainnet version is set to launch in early 2018.

Aeon tokens, which users will purchase with digital or fiat currency, will fuel the blockchain platform.

Aeternity will have an initial token offering in the first quarter of 2017.

Æternity Resources

How To Buy Æternity?

Send Bitcoin to æternity’s Contribution Wallet

Where do you keep your bitcoin?

In order to own bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, you need to have a wallet. Many types of wallets exist. There are exchange wallets (in Coinbase, Bitstamp, Kraken, etc) hardware wallets (Ledger, TREZOR, etc.), desktop wallets (so many!), mobile wallets (numerous!), paper wallets and different implementations of these same types.

Not all of those wallets entitle you to direct access to your private keys.

Therefore, we:

Do not send bitcoins directly from exchanges, ShapeShift-like services, mixers, or any other 3rd party service that does not provide you access to private keys. Generate a new wallet.

1. Go to wallet.aeternity.com

There you will see stats regarding the state of the campaign — total size of contributions generated so far in bitcoin and ether, generated AE tokens, time left, bonuses, etc.

Scroll down to the “Contribute Now” button and press it.

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2. Select BTC as your contribution method

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3. Choose type of bitcoin wallet

We strongly recommend to generate a new wallet.

If you are not 100% sure you are controlling your private key or seed, simply create one by selecting “Generate New Wallet”.

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4. Confirm you are not an US resident and accept terms and conditions

Please read and accept by pressing the “I have read and accept…” button.

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5. Generate wallet

You will be taken to “Generate Wallet” page. Read through all the privacy warnings by pressing “Okay, I got it”

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6. Write down your seed!

Write down your seed on a sheet of paper. It cannot be copy-pasted intentionally.

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7. Confirm that your seed is correct by re-entering the seed words

Enter the seed words that you just copied in the correct order. If the word is correct, the box will light up in green. If you have missed a word or the system does not accept your word entry (the box will light up in red), simply restart the process and generate a new wallet. If all is OK ,press “Looks good”

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8. Access your newly generated wallet

You will see the public address of your newly generated wallet. Send BTC to that address before continuing to the next step. Please allow at least one confirmation on the BTC network before proceeding to the next step.

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If there are no confirmed transactions in your newly generated Bitcoin wallet, you will see this message:

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9. Contribute by sending from your newly generated wallet

You must see the amount that you have send to your brand BTC wallet (of which you know the seed) under “Account Balance”.

If your balance is zero, please go back to step 3, click “Use your own wallet”, select “Mnemonic phrase” and enter the words from your seed, separated by spaces. If your seed is accepted, the contours of the box will light up in green.

You can add a message that will be included in æternity’s genesis block.

Press “Send Entire Balance”, if you want to send the entire balance of your wallet.

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10. Press “Contribute”

11. Press “Send Transaction”

12. Confirm your contribution

This pop-up should appear at the bottom:

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How to check your contribution?

You can press the “View your transaction” link that appeared in the green box. That will load a bitcoin block explorer page. However, if you do it too quickly your transaction might not be immediately visible. If it is not, wait a bit and refresh the explorer page. Alternatively, go directly to blockchain.info and in the top right box, enter your new wallet address and press search. You will see your contribution transaction.

Latest Æternity News

World Blockchain Summit, Nairobi, March 22–23, 2018

Kenya’s forward-looking government is prioritizing its various service areas in public and private organizations that can benefit from blockchain technologies — and educate the market about the transformational potential of blockchain technology. The Summit aims to connect global blockchain gurus, technology innovators, investors and startups in this space — with regional business and IT leaders from across key industry verticals to debate on the nature of blockchain and its many potential to improve efficiency in every business processes.

Chainges, Amsterdam, May 4–5, 2018

Chainges is the first two-day blockchain and cryptocurrency event shaped by the community. They try to mix blockchain technology with crypto-economy. æternity will hold an æpps workshop and will have a feature presentation. Get more information about the event and meet us there! Read’s Vlad’s introduction.

Blockchain Forum India, Mumbai, February 27–28, 2018

The Forum will help attendees understand the concept of blockchains and to bring projects in this space to mainstream. Moreover, there will be a strong focus on educating organizations on the value the blockchain can bring to the business table. More info.

Crypto Assets Conference, Frankfurt, February 26–27, 2018

The Crypto Assets Conference presents a line-up of the next generation of disrupters and thought-leaders and provides answers for global decision about the most pressing questions like: what impact do cryptocurrencies have on international trade; how are innovators adopting cryptocurrencies against today’s monopolies; if tokens are boosting crowdfunding and venture capital to new heights — which industry will benefit next? æternity’s founder Yanislav Malahov will give a talk at the Startup & Innovation track. Visit the event’s website.