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The team is delighted to announce that the AVM — Aion Virtual Machine is now ready for production and they are kicking off the release process.

• Read about the AVM here.

As usual, changes are released to Mastery in advance of Mainnet so Java Kernel v0.4.0 has been released for Mastery Testnet (Please note that this repo is a temporary repo and will be deprecated when the Mainnet binary is released).

Aion released the ARRT (Aion Research and Roadmap Team) draft Unity white paper. The paper explains in technical detail the approach to implement Unity, a combination Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.

The goals they’re looking to achieve with Unity are:

Increase the security of the network by introducing economic security via Proof-of-Stake

Adaptable to network size and topology

Lower barrier of entry to participate in network security via staking

Represent a progression in Aion, simple to implement

Retain probability distribution introduced in PoW (see below)

The initial research has led the team to be confident that Unity will improve the security of the Aion network while simultaneously improving the through-put capability. The ARRT team is still working on fork selections and slashing mechanisms but they’re very excited to have Unity on their roadmap.

For the full Unity draft white paper PDF click here

Showcase — May 1st, 2019:

Showcases are a monthly recurring set of presentations to create information symmetry both internally and externally. Showcases are an opportunity for Aion Foundation teams to share progress they’ve made in the previous four week period. They come prepared with talking points in a consumable group format that covers a 10 minute period (presentation, demo, etc.) In attendance are the members of the presenting “pod” and all “pod leads”.

Aion transparency and information sharing continues. This month’s showcase includes progress from ARRT, Barbados, Accelerating Adoption, Developer Success and the AVM production team which includes the Kernel.

AVM Production Update:

Talking Points

0.3.4 kernel release with AVM balance transfers, which added multiple steps due to some errors internally but we’re getting better at managing the releases

Are these hackathons worth it for beginners? We are not finding the high quality of developers who will actually try out the AVM’s features. Probably need to pick where we want our attention to come from

Last build of the AVM testnet to happen this week

Dates for the upgrades will be set by block number and will be part of the configuration in the code

Not too worried about the date slips

Matt feedback: we can just launch without Rust integration and have them catch up to the hard fork

Minh: code update will happen a day after the seed updates so there will be enough time to figure out Rust timelines

Matt: we can figure out who’s running Rust clients and manage them accordingly

Q&A

Matt: is modularity making it easier for other networks to integrate the AVM?

Jeff: It is already easy to do that, the modularity initiative is to make it easier to modularize the Aion codebase into SDKs. It helps test and understand breaking points in a much more efficient way.

Matt: put more thought into which hackathons and audience we want to focus on?

Mike: we want to productize the way we think about these use cases, and help identify what problems people are trying to solve.

Matt: this is an opportunity to go after an audience to differentiate ourselves, while providing a toolset and have Aion as the first choice.

Jeff: We can target Java ecosystem, why don’t we just create SDK for the enterprise version that simplifies how to do that without having them to know about the entire environment.

Matt: we should have clear goals on the modularity aspect and how it fits into getting adoption of getting people onboard with our stack.

Jeff: we need to prove that people be able to use it.

Mike: the product is the smart contract platform and the AVM is only a part of it, and the people interfacing with us are not blockchain builders or only looking at AVM, they are people who have problems.

Matt: we need to figure out if these are two parts of the same strategy. Ethereum has grown into bigger ecosystem because people are coming up with creative contracts and protocols that we might not fully understand all these things.

Mike: The smart contract templates and getting standards is what pushes those things to the protocol. This could be where Aion differentiates and sets it itself up for success by moving faster.

Acceleration Adoption Showcase:

Talking Points

Trust Wallet — Also working on dApp integration with them

KMS Chain — Connecting them with partners that need re-encryption service

NFT — being build by William, kicking off in the next week

Chain Link — working on short-term oracle functionality into Aion Java contracts before their mainnet launch

Bidali — working on Mobile SDK integration for gift card off-ramps

Velocia — Finalizing prep for Miami, contracts reviewed ready for the 2–3K university user group to start beta

Q&A

Mike: Looks like we have a lot of good wallets and pools going live — more than meeting our requirements. Where should we be focusing our efforts next in terms of capital and time?

Mike: We still definitely have a need for an off/on ramp for Fiat to Aion. How are we tracking towards this?

Karim: Yes we are targeting and working with certain exchanges that support this functionality like Changelly and Bidali. Also in the process for others.

Matt: Lets keep investigating how to collaborate on with others foundations on common grants that can create stand-alone successful products that support multiple protocols (ex: browser extension)

ARRT:

Talking Points

NXT — Looked at pure staking solutions, they have to have poisson process. With this criteria, you can leverage existing assumptions and proofs for Nakamoto Consensus.

Tendermint — makes tradeoffs with liveness

Beacon chain — promising, but has issues with decoupling with their main chain

dPOS — other problems (described in the rebuild video presentation)

Decred — good solution, but has an imbalance between block validators and producers.

Unity — we like NXT and simplicity, but can we keep that property with mining and have it better than Decred

Results were pretty convincing — the graphs shows PoS distribution that gives us the stochastic properties we want. This gives us a fair representation of power for each mechanism that is consistent with 10 second blocks.

Casper FFG, GRANDPA — could work in parallel to us as Unity would be treated like any other block production layer. We would need to see if restrictions on the fork choice rule this would impose could affect the protocol.

Q&A

Jeff: we should start calling out problems in the space that are unsolvable, essentially to remind people why certain proposals are not good and will never work

Matt: if we can prove designs are broken, it can be utilized as a marketing scheme

Jeff: we do not want to be drinking the “cool aid” that people in the space is having. We need to have the statement from the top-level and on a lower-level on how blockchains should be implemented and decide the right timing to make those decisions and communicate it to the public.

Matt: What is the rest of the ARRT team proposing to focus on after unity? What is worth doing now is making sure we put everything that should be considered so we look at the full list of items and prioritize them.

Yao: we have ideas of what we could do, but we want to focus on implementing the current research. We will propose what we should do and get feedback. I wonder if us proposing sets the tone and puts some bias.

Matt: what we can do with ARRT, what are the pain points with regular software that Aion can solve?

Jeff: this is more of a product discussion and not research.

Ian: do we expect feedback in the next 2 weeks before the final draft on May 17? Is there a distribution list for people to see and evaluate the white-paper draft?

Matt: let’s put this in front of Cosmos on why we didn’t choose Tendermint and see their feedback — it will be valuable to get that from high quality projects. We can try with Vitalik and 10–15 other projects.

Sam: would be great to publish all the insights we’ve gathered over this in-depth research around consensus

Mike: it should have a collaborative vibe when doing these articles

Dev Success Showcase:

Talking points

Analytics — improvements every month on every single category, which shows a greater audience and awareness

Target 5% and we got 3.2%, which is good but no there yet

Hackathon — helped us better provide docs, and improve overall dev exp etc.

Coming up next is

“What is” series

Roundtable videos

Better process of video production

Working with an agency to work on new productizing docs website and finalizing the scope end of week

Q&A

Ian: do we know who is consuming the docs?

Mike: most is coming from coinmarketcap

Sam: How are we doing on stack overflow? Kim: will ramp up much more on AVM launch

Sam: let’s push all the conversations we have onto stack overflow to show live conversation and questions

Ian: let’s make sure we get a bonus when helping out any applications to launch. We want to help influence and understand these metrics

Matt: are we revisiting the reason to have learn and docs to be separate?

Mike: docs becomes universal source of truth and learn will transition pending research

Sam: how we make decisions on learn topic

Mike: based on content roadmap, John has been working on productizing docs but we will re-emphasize who is our audience and what we are and are not doing by next showcase.

Matt: with a new audience, what can we do to simplify the process for the bottlenecks for each audience

Sam: we commoditize all the components into the docs that we co-create with a specific audience and have a product owner for that portion

Barbados Team Showcase:

Q&A