Æternity (AE) is a Bulgarian-born coin that looks to ease out the increasing traffic as well as improve the scalability problem that its parent blockchain, Ethereum faces. Ethereum has been experiencing a slower network, scalability problems and relatively high fees. AE token aims at allowing newcomers in the space to be able to create decentralized applications on the network. The platform also has its own smart contracts that will allow other tokens to raise ICOs on the network. Currently, the coin offers a solution to one of the most important cryptocurrencies, Ethereum but has other competitors such as NEO, Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Tezos.

History of Æternity

The coin started its development early in 2017, while the ICO took place in May, later that year. The coin has seen massive developments in its roadmap projections. However, there was the exception of Zack, the former CTO resigning since inception. Aeternity first offered AE through a contribution campaign. Through this campaign, the team raised 121,212 Ether and 324 Bitcoins; that was a rough estimate of 12,500,000 USD at the time.

Why Æternity?

Aeternity enables unique governance where miners vote and value-holders bet to make decisions together. It uses a collection of information obtained from prediction markets and then made available to the miners’ network that signals them on which blockchain to mine.

The network aids to decentralize oracles. An oracle machine connects public real-world data with smart contracts. It can provide tamper-proof public data and execute accordingly to it with other block chains. Therefore an oracle is bad for decentralization being typically a single point of failure. However, Aeternity oracle is instead decentralized.

It also promotes privacy. The hybrid Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanisms are within the blockchain’s architecture offering privacy and scalability. The parties of a smart contract can transfer tokens between them through channels without storing the code in the chain.

As you already understand, in order to become scalable, Aeternity will store a lot of data off-chain, in state channels.

Ownership

How to buy

The coin is currently running on the Ethereum blockchain before its main net goes live later this year. AE is currently traded on over ten exchanges with Binance trading over a third of the daily volume traded.

Once obtained it is crucial to know how to store your coins. The ERC20 token can be stored on any Ethereum wallet such as MyEtherWallet or the hardware wallets such as Ledger Nano S and Trezor. These two options offer the best way to store the coins.

Æternity ICO

The coin was available to the public through an ICO that lasted for a month (May-June 2017) and raised a total of $24 million in its first phase of the offering. The ICO completed having raised $70 million that will feed the development of the core network. The team will have to hire developers and work longer hours in order to complete the main net network, the launch of its own Aeternity blockchain, by Q2 2018 as stated on its roadmap.

Team

The team currently consist of 48 members, after the CTO known as Zack Bitcoin, announced his resignation from the company on Github, in September 2017. Zack cited lack of enough compensation as one of the main conflicts that led to his resignation; the owner of the company, Yanislav Malahov, accused him of keeping all the tokens to himself.

Yanislav Georgiev Malahov, Creator of Aeternity :

Yanislav is known as “the godfather of Ethereum” and started working on the project in late 2013. He has worked on various cryptocurrencies since. He is currently the lead developer at Aeternity and CEO.

Marion Vogel, Director :

Being intrigued by the magic of blockchain technology since early 2014, Marion is especially interested in connecting the dots between technology and the growing community. Research on the socioeconomic impact, spreading the word and taking care of handling æternity’s operations efficiently is where she performs best. Previously she held marketing & business development positions in Silicon Valley.

Emin Mahrt, COO :

Emin has started a publishing media company and is known as a serial investor in various startups. Emin is currently the CPO and operations manager for Aeternity Blockchain.