Catching up: What is Aion?

Not-For-Profit Foundation

The Aion Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that provides core blockchain software development, leadership, and governance for the Aion Network.

Aion’s founders are Matt Spoke, Kesem Frank, and Jin Tu. They first worked together on Deloitte’s blockchain team before spinning out as their own startup (Nuco) to provide blockchain infrastructure services for enterprises. They have provided blockchain solutions for TMX Group, Moog, Deloitte, Government of Ontario, Vodafone, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and others.

Matt Spoke has many close and longstanding ties with the Toronto blockchain community. Matt is a Founding Steward of the Muskoka Group and a Founding Board Member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Matt was also appointed as an Advisor to the Ontario Securities Commission and Ministry of Finance.

Recently, Matt was announced as a Founding Director of the Blockchain Technology Coalition of Canada, an organization whose goals are to help design and promote blockchain industry standards for self regulation, promote education, and advocate for a Canadian legal and regulatory environment that protects consumers and fosters innovation.

The Aion team has grown quickly — Aion now has over 60 employees (including over 30 engineers) between their home office in Toronto and offices in Barbados and Shanghai.

Network of Blockchains

The Aion Network will use a hub-and-spoke model to connect public and private blockchains to each other through bridges connected to Aion’s public blockchain(s).

from BicameralVentures.com

An obvious use case is a decentralized exchange (e.g. Bancor) that allows trading cryptocurrency between multiple blockchains without requiring a centralized intermediary.

Aion’s tech is intended to go even further and allow users access to value, data, and dApps on connected chains. The literal network effects include partnerships with Icon, Wanchain, SingularityNET, Enigma, SONM, Metaverse, Bitt, F2Pool, ePIC and more recently Amberdata, Shyft, Nodesmith, Coinomi, and BlockDaemon.

Aion’s token swap is powered in part by Aion’s Token Bridge, which is Aion’s first bridge to another public blockchain (Ethereum) — but not the last.

The Aion network is not limited to public blockchains. In fact, the need for a way to connect private and permissioned enterprise blockchains to each other and to public blockchains was largely what inspired the founders to create Aion.

In spring 2018, Deloitte surveyed over 1000 senior executives about their companies’ blockchain attitudes and investments. The results indicate that big companies are looking at implementing private blockchains with permissioned access to public blockchains and consortium blockchains.

Aion’s interchain communication protocol and bridges aim to be that access point — the tickets and rails of the decentralized internet.

Optimized Blockchain Software

Aion built its blockchain software from the protocol layer up to maximize vertical and horizontal scalability and lay the foundation for blockchain interoperability.

from BicameralVentures.com

Aion’s FastVM (current release) has already achieved faster and less-expensive transactions than Ethereum’s VM in benchmark tests. The Aion Virtual Machine and Scripting Language are slated for release before the end of the year and will introduce additional speed and efficiency improvements and new developer tools.

The Aion team is working to solve interoperability between blockchains by developing a blockchain-agnostic interchain communication and bridging protocol capable of transmitting arbitrary value, data, and logic between blockchains. This will operate similar to the internet’s TCP/IP and routing, and is slated for release in 2019.

from Aion’s White Paper

While some other projects’ ultimate goal is to transfer tokens between chains, Aion wants to enable the movement of many different types of information between blockchains, like messages and executable code. Aion’s bridges will also allow users to offload transactions and computations from the main net to side chains to avoid CryptoKitties-esque bottlenecks.

You can learn more about the technical details in Aion’s white papers, Blockgeek’s comprehensive guide (or quick video), Aion’s GitHub, and on Aion’s Forum.

Live Public Blockchain

Aion’s Proof of Work main net (Kilimanjaro) is live, and recently hit 1,000,000 blocks. Documentation and instructions are available for smart contract deployment and mining (which is still profitable). Developers and projects can use Aion’s tools to build dApps (or migrate them from Ethereum), create and distribute interoperable tokens, and offer their services on Aion today.

Six projects launching on Aion have already been announced:

More project launch announcements are expected before the end of 2018.

Cryptocurrency and Economics

Aion’s token supply dynamics are predictable, and will become even more stable in November 2018 at the end of the token release schedule for early purchasers.

From Shutterstock

Aion tokens are much more like Ether than Bitcoin in that their value doesn’t come primarily from use as a medium of exchange or store of value. Instead, Aion tokens are intended to be used as the fuel (e.g. oil/gas) needed to power transactions on the main net and bridges, smart contacts, dApps, VM functionality, and to incentivize consensus through mining and staking.