What you need to know about the Aergo mainnet launch

Key components, token information, and more details regarding what to expect for launch on April 15.

For the month of our mainnet launch, we’re showing our community what Aergo is really about: through the “4/19 campaign”! This is the first article part of the series, giving more information regarding the Aergo mainnet.

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Introduction

It has been eight months now that we have been working long and hard to build a blockchain protocol that provides the performance and reliability necessary to run the Aergo main network.

The Aergo main net is the central hub of the Aergo platform. It allows disparate side chains on the platform to communicate with each other using a permissionless-public layer for trustless settlement and immutable data anchoring. It acts as a core component to the network and underpins Aergo’s hybrid blockchain architecture design: creating new business models and revenue streams for all kinds of businesses and developers.

Aergo’s main network will be an open, permissionless system. A decentralized one: that any developer or business user can interact with to build new kinds of applications and services. It will be the public infrastructure to run business applications and services that, going forward, connects third-parties in ways that reduce costs and increase efficiencies in all industry sectors. The launch of the Aergo main network means that the beginning of this vision will now slowly turn into a reality. It all starts now.

The Aergo main network is being created as The Backbone for Business. Providing an efficient, hybrid blockchain infrastructure is what we have put our focus towards. The mainnet will act as a central hub for an internet of business and consumer-focused permissioned blockchains tailored for specific use cases.

As a broad platform, Aergo hosts both crypto-centric decentralized applications as well as enterprise-IT solutions. It provides developers with a compelling case for building applications and enterprises a compelling case for deploying cloud solutions on the platform.

We have many stakeholders that we anticipate will be participating in the network. This includes the Aergo Organization, partners, block producers, application providers, the community, and enterprise clients.

The Aergo Organization plays a key role in the Aergo Main Network. As a non-profit dedicated to Aergo’s success, the Aergo Organization leads the long-term growout plan for the main network and collaborates with strategic partners to make its visions a reality. The goal of the Aergo Organization is to ensure that the open-source network and ecosystem succeed and sees meaningful adoption.

To mutual benefit, Aergo’s partners will create new business opportunities using the blockchain. Blocko, formerly a private blockchain solutions provider for enterprise clients, put significant resources towards developing Aergo. In return, Blocko was able to ensure it has access to a truly high-performance, full-stack, hybrid blockchain platform to use for its future implementations and to extend its existing ones. Already with a large market share in South Korea, Blocko will see a slew of new opportunities with a truly high-scale, open, and trustless architecture.

Our community, one of the most important pillars to the Aergo project, will help spread the word about the platform. They will take the responsibility of staking tokens to help validate our network, and steer our ecosystem in the right direction, democratically.

Block producers will host the network as well as the microservices provided in the IT platform. They will be rewarded with fees; paying the network’s maintenance costs. We plan to support block producers in our network’s early stages through a variety of incubation programs.

Application providers and enterprise clients will create real growth of the Aergo open-source ecosystem and blockchain network. By utilizing our architecture; our software; our protocols; our platform, they will capture true value, which will translate into the Aergo coin. They will complete the self sufficiency cycle the Aergo network needs in order to thrive.

Not all of Aergo’s planned features will be included in the main network at this time. We plan to further improve the token fee model, and we look to grow out our block producer ecosystem to shift the Aergo network into a more mature state as time passes by. Additionally, there are some features we plan to add over the coming months.

Our network will mature. The mainnet launch is just the beginning and we anticipate that Aergo will grow through a number of phases: (1) Incubation, (2) Acceleration, and finally (3) Liberation. Eventually, Aergo will evolve into a stable and decentralized network. We will publish an article explaining the phases of the Aergo mainnet post-launch in the coming weeks.

Key Components Released

In this section, we’ll summarize the major components of the Aergo main network. A full list and more detail can be found on our developer guide at docs.aergo.io.

BFT-dPOS Consensus

We chose Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Delegated Proof of Stake (BFT-dPOS) to achieve the quality of service (QoS) that we think is key. It will provide a high maximum throughput and stable average performance. It achieves finality by implementing an irreversible block height.

The block producers creating blocks on the main network are a key consideration factor here. The initial phase of the network, the Incubation Phase, will have ten to thirteen block producers. Eventually, we look at have twenty-three, as we advance into more advanced phases of the network (again, a full article explaining this will be released over the course of the 4/19 campaign).

The block creation interval is one second. With BFT-dPOS, wehave achieved a peak of 20,000 and an average of 6000 to 7000 experimental transactions per second (TPS) on our test network.

Lua Smart Contracts

Smart contracts on the Aergo main network are based on the Aergo Lua language. Aergo Lua is a Lua smart contract language, typically with support for SQL-like syntax. However, SQL is not included in this launch for the public network. SQL can still be used for permissioned chains connected to the main network and on our SQL testnet, though not on the main network. The feature itself is complete, though we must take extra consideration for token utility before applying it to the main network.

Tool

A new integrated development environment (IDE) is available. We thought that users may need an easy-to-use gateway to begin building on Aergo. As such, we now provide the Aergo IDE for Atom. Developers can test and deploy smart contracts easily right inside one of the most popular code editors. The IDE provides a rich UI that makes it easy for developers to use the Aergo blockchain without using command line tools or writing extra code.