Incubation Phase Update

What team æternity accomplished between Phases 1 and 2.

Development

Protocol development reached a point where all upcoming applications are able to run safely. Detailed description about æternity’s technology can be found in this new blog post.

We are now focusing on interface (SPV Wallet, block explorer) and feature development (State Channels, Trustless Markets).

Zackary Hess, our tech lead, is currently working on implementing lightning routing via State Channels.

So far messages travel 6 out of 10 lightning handshakes, meaning in the coming days we will have off-chain transactions with lightning routing ready for deployment in the testnet!

Features currently being developed

State Channels

Using the State Channels for processing bets and payments successfully
Using Lightning Routing via State Channels

Recently done:

Setting up the State Channels to accept & process Oracle bets
Setting up the State Channels to accept & process payments
1 Hop-Lightning transaction (payment)

Tasks up next:

Multi-Hop lightning transaction (payments)
1-Hop lightning transaction (contract)
Multi-Hop lightning transaction (contract)
Trustless moving of contract to a shorter path

Research

Integration with other Blockchains

In the wake of our quest for potential partnerships and collaboration possibilities, we encountered the question about how complex or difficult it would be to make the æternity and its consensus algorithms compatible with other blockchain protocols, e.g. via interledger. æternity’s decentralized oracle is a feature that other blockchain projects may be interested in.

According to Zackary, this can be done with a minimum amount of difficulty, as there is only one thing to do — installing a new hashing algorithm (instead of the currently applied SHA256).

Use-Case Concepts

Education

We can utilize æternity’s powerful features to disrupt education with blockchain by creating an open marketplace where students and teachers alike, can trade private or group lessons. It should include social profiles of both teachers and students and could be gamified. Also, by using æternity’s oracle, students can allow more than one teacher to rate a test, exam or other work.

Charity Crowdfunding

Enhance crowdfunding platforms with the ability to better granulate release and coordinate and review application of funds.

Supply Chain Management — Automation

We managed to sketched up a high level concept of how in the near future, Supply Chain Management (SCM) could be fully automated and transparent to leverage profits for everyone involved, proportional to the energy/time/attention invested.

Organization

Working on a release plan

In order to properly test the code and all its components thoroughly, a regular roll out of newly written code onto the testnet (for integration test purposes) is vital.

We are currently discussing how to establish a secure, efficient and lean release process to roll out features as fast and secure as possible. At the same time we are working towards offering an attractive platform to gather resourceful, motivated & progressive developers around meaningful projects and ideas.

Human resources

The æternity team is interviewing developers and UI/UX designers to extend our core with like-minded individuals that can contribute to the process of making the æternity mainnet a reality. More nimble minds joined our cause during the incubation phase, here they are:

Michal Zajda — SENIOR ERLANG ARCHITECT
Alex Siman — SENIOR WEB DEVELOPER
Andrey Stehno — SENIOR FULL-STACK DEVELOPER
Alessandro De Carli — TECHNICAL BLOCKCHAIN ADVISOR
Steve Dakh — CRYPTO TECH ADVISOR

For more information, check out the updated team page on the website.

Expanding the community

Part of the team is working on facilitating the Ledger Nano S claim process and aiding people in Slack & Telegram with troubleshooting. Shipping has already commenced.

We have collected your ‘sent from exchange’ issue requests and are evaluating how to proceed with issue, please be patient here, as despite our best efforts, we expect to have some more ‘sent from exchanges’ cases. We would like to again ask any potential contributors to NOT send directly from exchanges! Read this before you contribute.

Incubating æternity

We are about to conclude the process of establishing a Liechtenstein based foundation, in order to formalize and strengthen æternity, as well as other open-source blockchains and projects. The government of Liechtenstein welcomes technology startups and the progressive judicial system is an ideal harbor to commence the voyage into the blue ocean of blockchain technology.

Once the foundation is set up, we will start the incubator program to facilitate the brightest, most promising minds and projects to start being build on æternity. One of the locations for the Incubator will be Ukraine and Bulgaria, due to the availability of experienced developers and a well-developed cryptocurrency/blockchain community.

We are happy to announce our provisional appointment to ‘Research and Technical Advisory’ (RATA) at the Hong Kong based Belt and Road Blockchain Consortium. With this initiative, we are striving to make a change by improving global SCM, making it more transparent, efficient, profitable and sustainable.

Building networks

Right after the Phase 1, we spread out to carry the word of æternity to the ears of understanding, as well as building and maintaining potential partnerships and collaborations.

This is a complete list of meetups and conferences that we attended during the incubation phase:

BlockShow Europe 2017, Munich, April 6, 2017
Blockchain Stuttgart, April 24, 2017
Webit.Festival Europe, Sofia, April 25–26, 2017
Blockchain Cologne, Cologne, May 4, 2017
Founders Club Maastricht, Brightlands Campus, Heerlen, May 11, 2017
æternity Hong Kong Meetup, Hong Kong, May 14, 2017
FinTech Matters 2017, Vienna, May 17, 2017
Gottfried Von Haberler Conference, Vaduz, May 19, 2017
Consensus 2017, New York, May 22–24, 2017
æternity Berlin Meetup, Berlin May 30th, 2017
Blockchain for Healthcare, Berlin, May 31, 2017
Blockchain Expo Europe, Berlin, June 1–2, 2017

More event details at the dedicated blog post.

Meetups

In addition, over 25 meetups in different cities all around the world were held during the incubation phase! Seoul, Beirut, Capetown, Malta, Rotterdam, Venezuela & Berlin, just to name a few.

We will be happy to see you at one of the upcoming meetups or maybe even start one in your own town?

Wiki Bounty

The Wiki Bounty has drawn some attention and populated the Wiki on GitHub with lots of content, feel free to dig in.

Building and maintaining a formidable, creative, colorful and vibrant community is a rewarding task, primarily because almost everyone involved is creative, industrious, open minded & respectful.

A humongous THANK YOU to the amazing community æternity is supported by!

Come and join the one of the most precious and rapidly growing communities in the Blockchain space at:

æternity Blog