Announcing New Development Timeline and Team Restructuring

In the light of development delays, we are announcing changes to æternity’s team structure.

Dear æternity Community,

despite the best efforts of æternity’s CTO Joel Reymont to restructure the dev team and improve the efficiency of development, we were unable to avoid some delays. We are therefore forced to announce that the new testnet launch is postponed until it is stable and meets all our requirements. Mainnet security audit is expected to happen in Q1 and launch is expected for Q2, 2018.

Joel Reymont did a great job as an interim CTO. He managed to build a team of senior Erlang engineers and ship code over the past months. The engineering team gained valuable experience in developing blockchain architectures and succeeded in rebuilding æternity’s testnet from scratch in one fourth of the size of the previous code. While working on the new testnet release, they experienced unforeseeable code behaviors, possible attack vectors and simple bugs. Weeks were spent implementing Cuckoo Cycle, because the process was unexpectedly difficult despite involving John Tromp, the mining algorithm’s creator.

In the light of the current situation, Joel Reymont is leaving æternity to pursue new challenges in his professional career. In his place, Sascha Hanse is taking up the role of æternity’s new full-time blockchain lead developer. In addition, one of æternity’s first contractors — Michal Zajda — will step up to lead the core blockchain development. He will be supported by Erik Stenman, former CTO of Klarna.

Effective immediately, Sascha Hanse is æternity’s new blockchain lead engineer focusing on blockchain technology and decentralized app development. Sascha has worked for IOTA and a number of other blockchain projects. For the past 6 years he has invested much time and energy researching blockchain technology, the cryptography behind it and is passionate about blockchain resilience and security. His primary focus at æternity so far has been smart contracts and æpps development. This provides him with an unique perspective on the most pressing issues of decentralized apps ecosystems and will help him perform his role more effectively. Together with Michal and Erik he is leading a team of nearly 200 years of engineering experience.

As part of the current team restructuring, Emin Mahrt will take on the project’s operative tasks as æternity’s new chief operating officer and Nikola Stojanow will focus on æternity ventures and business relations as æternity’s chief business development officer.

The æternity team remains fully committed to delivering industry-grade software empowering the decentralized economy of tomorrow. Becoming the top blockchain for applications will require us to incorporate any feedback from the community at an early stage. We are more than confident that Sascha, Michal and Erik, together with Yanislav, æternity’s founder who created the vision and gathered the initial team, will succeed in specifying the project blockchain components and bring powerful apps and algorithms into æternity.

Thank you for your continued support!

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