The Next Wave by Michael O’Rourke: discussing impact of the Aion’s Java-based AVM on mobile dApp development.

There are two major cycles that have resulted in a significant explosion of the number of cryptocurrencies in existence. The first being Bitcoin, which has led to many forks, ranging from small configuration changes such as Litecoin to innovations of much bolder magnitude such as Dash and Decred.

The second movement came post-Ethereum, which spawned dozens of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based cryptocurrencies and thousands of protocols based on the ERC20 standard that was initially proposed in late 2015. One could argue that these new EVM based cryptocurrencies are a loose form of sharding for the greater blockchain ecosystem in and of itself, especially given the ways in which implementation bridges allow networks to hop in between any of the EVM based protocols.

The main challenge for most EVM based protocols is finding a value proposition compelling enough to excite existing blockchain developers to work on them and grow the market to a point where new developers are willing and able to onboard, using the new tools. On top of that, the development environment for EVM based protocols is incredibly immature — which is why Aion team is seeing other protocols choose existing frameworks and programming languages to leverage their platforms.

Enter the AVM

While AION was originally released using the FastVM (a modified version of the EVM), the transition to releasing the Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) will attract engineers with the ability to program on this novel framework from the start, and build the next wave of decentralized applications.

The AVM will allow anyone to write a smart contract in the Java programming language and utilize the massive, mature toolset that is available for the most popular programming language in the world. The ability for a developer to walk into an existing, comfortable development environment while learning how to leverage the blockchain will open the floodgates.

There are an estimated over 6 million Android developers in the world. The ability to create a full stack, decentralized application without a traditional backend that reaches over 2 billion active Android devices is incredibly powerful. AION is laying the groundwork that empowers any person’s ideas to have an immediate reach and impact that can grow exponentially.

Aion goal as an industry should be to enable any developer to easily leverage the blockchain as another tool in their toolbox.