Aion: The Aion Foundation Transparency Report together with Deloitte, New articles on AVM explaining why Java and a few visionary articles by AION team Paradigm Follow Dec 18, 2018 · 9 min read

Biweekly update 4th December-18th December

Development

GitHub metrics

Recovery period:

• Bridge until December 10th 2018.

• Changelly until December 21st 2018.

Over these 12 weeks, Aion team built an ecosystem of mobile, web, hardware and desktop wallets plus leading global and regional exchanges. Providing community with multiple options and tools depending on their technical experience and preferences.

They also launched the first Aion bridge, the Token Transfer bridge marking the first token swap to provide a trustless mechanism to migrate assets.

By putting their technology to the test and bringing together an engaged ecosystem of global partners and community members, they have completed the swap period with over 94% of ERC-20 tokens converted. This amazing participation in such a condensed period of time marks the Aion Token Swap as the most engaged token swap to date.

If you still haven’t swapped your AION Tokens to AION Coins, the easiest way for you to complete the swap is to use Changelly, just click the link below.

To read more about Changelly supporting the AION Token swap, take a look at the article below.

AION Coin can now be purchased or sold on the following exchanges.

AION Coin can now be held in the following wallets.

Aion Wallet — https://docs.aion.network/docs/install-the-aion-desktop-wallet

Ledger — https://www.ledger.com

Coinomi — https://www.coinomi.com/en/

Cryptocurve — https://cryptocurve.io/

Magnum — https://magnumwallet.co/

Vault (Beta) — https://vaultwallet.io/

AIWA Chrome Extension(Beta) — https://getaiwa.com/

For a complete list of all swap documentation, please review Token Swap overview documentation.

New on Aion Virtual Machine:

Hello World … from the Aion Virtual Machine! by Nick Nadeau:

Anatomy Of A Java Smart Contract

The Smart Contract Entry Point

Passing Input Into The Smart Contract

Execution Flow Of The Smart Contract

Blockchain-Safe Java

You can check out the source code for the Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) at Aion Github repository here, and run through the example for yourself.

Aion Virtual Machine (AVM): Why not WASM? by Jeff Disher: a blog post why Aion team doesn’t think ewasm is the right choice for Blockchain VM design.

Final thoughts:

The team suspect that all of EVM, WASM, and JVM are feasible approaches, each with their own trade-offs or (in the cases of WASM and JVM) feature restrictions. The ideal (at least for this generation of problems) is probably somewhere in between and maybe they will glimpse that as these various approaches progress.

WASM isn’t a bad choice for the blockchain, by any means, but it also isn’t an obviously good choice. The JVM gave confidence and the ability to get this into the hands of a large developer base and tooling ecosystem quickly.

Comparing EVM/WASM/JVM (*can be disabled, + can be restricted/hidden). Source: Aion blog.

Other:

Solo Pool Software Update: The solo mining pool software and version 0.3.2 of the kernel had some implementation differences for batch rpc calls, changes have been merged to the main branch.

When migrating to v0.3.2 of the kernel; please use the latest version of the solo mining pool software in this branch.

Aion-Web3 Update: The team has made updates to aion-web3 repo and updated the library from v1.1.2 to v1.1.4.

Kernel update v0.3.2: An update on the latest version of the kernel.

Aion’s Java-based AVM now on GitHub.

Social encounters

The report opens with a letter from Matthew Spoke, CEO and Co-Founder of the Aion Project and a Director of the Aion Foundation. Matt’s letter speaks to the importance of transparency and why the Aion Foundation has chosen to take this step.

The report then goes on to outline the organizational structure and finances of the Aion Foundation, and discusses its role in the broader Aion ecosystem.

The Aion Foundation leaned heavily on the wisdom of Deloitte to produce a report that it hopes will serve as a standard for accountability and transparency for the entire industry.

“This report is our way of sharing with our community, supporters, and everyone who may be interested — who we are, what we do, what we are about, how we are thinking about our work, our purpose, our mission, and the work that we are prioritizing,” said Matthew Spoke, CEO and Co-Founder of the Aion Project and a Director of the Aion Foundation.

Official Link to the report.

Aion Foundation Report Q&A. In the AMA style, the Aion team answers top community questions.

In the Image of its Creators: How technologies are influenced by the principles and philosophies of those who make them — by Matthew Spoke: In this blog post Matt Spoke talks about how tech often takes on the principles and philosophies of its creators.

“The Aion Foundation is setting the tone and challenging its peers by kickstarting the industry’s move towards accountability and transparency. Beyond our leading research and engineering, we expect our community to hold us accountable to a higher standard. The Aion Foundation Report signals the first move in this direction.”

How we are Inheriting Broken Market Designs from the Past: Design considerations for the long-term viability and accessibility of service-based token models — by Sam Pajot-Phipps.

“We are at risk of inheriting broken market designs of the past into the cryptoeconomic models underpinning the services of the future” says Aion Network’s Sam Pajot-Phipps in latest “Signals from the Void” blog series.

Matt Spoke WeChat AMA with China’s Unitimes transcript: Aion Founder Matt Spoke completed an AMA on December 6th, 2018 on WeChat to a Chinese investor community of over 2,000 members managed by Unitimes, a FinTech media platform.

Videos:

Matt Spoke on Transparency in the Cryptocurrency Industry: At the Aion #Engage event on Sept 24th, 2018 in Toronto, CEO and Founder Matt Spoke presented his thoughts on the issues of trust and transparency in the crypto space to Ecosystem partners.

Commitment: Matt Spoke discusses trust and blockchain.

Commitment: Matt Spoke discusses long-term commitment to blockchain projects.

Governing Differently: Matt Spoke discusses how Aion focuses on governing differently.

Finance

Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Etherscan.io)

AION Token Listing on MetaMorph.pro.

AION is now listed on INEX.

Right on target (Phase 1 Complete):

Phase 1: Kilimanjaro 2018

Virtual Machine — FastVM with EVM Source Compatibility

Aion Interchain — Token Bridge and Interchain Communication

Aion Proof of Work — Equihash 210_9

Aion Core — Multi-Chain Framework, Wire Protocol (P2P), Tx Pool, Event Manager

Aion APIs — Java API, Web3 API Compatibility

Phase 2: Denali

Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) Version 1

This AVM is a custom-built, lightweight, performant, and stable VM that leverages key characteristics of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), providing concurrency and robustness within a blockchain-specific context. The AVM is responsible for running applications on top of Aion. The AVM will include its own scripting language.

Aion Scripting Language

The Aion scripting language is used for writing chain logic that runs on Aion-Everest and potentially any connecting/participating network. The Aion language is compiled into AVM bytecode and executed by the AVM. The Aion language provides the following features: Defensive programming, Blockchain runtime environment, Blockchain context injection, Security.

Proof-of-Intelligence Consensus Algorithm

An economic measure to deter denial of service attacks by requiring participants, solvers in Aion-Everest, to perform artificial intelligence (AI) computation. The intent is to motivate the creation of AI-specific or specialized hardware that could be used for machine learning and neural network training in the future.

Partnerships and team members

Protocol Weekly #21 — Including Latest Aion Updates: Protocol Weekly is a newsletter to exclusively showcase the progress of layer-1 and Ethereum layer-2 protocols.

Nodesmith Beta Update & the Road Ahead.

WandX Founder & CEO Abhinav Ramesh AMA Wednesday, December 19th at 10am EDT.

WandX is strategic decentralized infrastructure development partner based in Bangalore, India. Wandx is launching the following products: Aion Coin with Ledger integration within the WandX wallet, a decentralized exchange that has a unique feature called Basket Protocol and node infrastructure for decentralized applications.

How to manage AION on Ledger using Magnum Wallet in Magnum Wallet blog.

AIWA — A wallet and DApp interaction tool for the Aion Network is featured on BetaList.

Projects Building on Aion:

List of AION Mining pools with live stats & hashrate distribution.

Rumors

Twitter:

Messari‏ @MessariCrypto (December 5th, 2018): “We are excited to see this monumental effort from one of our first registry participants, @Aion_Network. Transparency and accountability are essential if we want to see the industry thrive.”

zooko — @zooko (December 8th, 2018): “I don’t know a single thing about this cybercoin called “Aion” except that they put out this detailed transparency report… But this all by itself speaks very well of them! Every cybercoin should do likewise.”

Matthew Spoke‏ @MattSpoke (December 14th, 2018): “As we close the year, it would be nice to see updates / summaries of 2018 accomplishments and challenges from various #crypto projects. Maybe Aion Network should publish New Years resolutions for 2019…”

How to Mine Aion (AION): Complete Beginner’s Guide.

Aion Info Hub (November 2018 Update).

Active Reddit discussions:

Why Aion over Polkadot?

Connecting the dots: A community-member analysis of the state of Aion.

Videos:

How to Mine AION | NVIDIA | AMD | smOS | Windows 10 on SavageMine youtube channel.

Telegram group:

@AionJay (Community manager, admin): “Vote to get Aion Founder Matt Spoke in the running for Coindesk’s “Most Influential People in Blockchain 2018.” His name was not considered in the choices, you have to add it in the other field.”

Social media metrics

Social media activity

Social media dynamics

Social media dynamics

The community is quite active discussing latest news, development, mining, token price and possible partnerships.

Twitter — Average number of retweets is 15–30 for one post. The number of followers has increased by 5 thousand over the last week.

Facebook — 10–15 likes per publication.

Reddit — threads with 2–10 comments.

Information from Cryptocompare.com

The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Aion Reddit subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook likes. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.

Aion forum — discussions on mining, news, network statistics etc.

Popular topics:

Top:

Discord — active discussions on the latest updates and mining.

Global Social Channels: