æternists are welcome! The development teams, foundation, and grantees keep making us proud of their work. They continued moving forward on the roadmap, and finally, the Lima hardfork was performed successfully at block height 161150. Thus, the aeternity Mainnet is currently running Lima Release 5.0.1. The upgrade adds a sophisticated, improved virtual machine (VM), governance, and naming system to challenge Ethereum and other blockchain platforms. As for other development updates: the aeternity blockchain Naming System or AENS gone live and the video tutorial where Emin Mahrt showed how to register a name was published; AirGap worked on implementing security fixes discovered in the security review and making the library more secure by protecting it against insecure dependencies; SDK JS and Python 6.0.1 for æternity is now out; Æternity payment application was updated, featuring restored deposit after channel-creation functionality and support of a cancellation of base-aepp SIGN dialog at Channel Open request.

Furthermore, a brief recap of æknow progress and few updates of grantees were published. Karol Skocik worked on the first implementation of AENS.update function support in Sophia contracts for ænode. Juraj Hlista released a paper about a new approach for signaling outcome computation — the initial assumption that the miner indicating parameters could be modified during node restarts and decided it’d safer not to be able to modify them instead was changed; the second approach uses a database table to store aggregated signal count per a key block.

As for the social life of æternity: several videos, interviews, and articles were published, meetups and workshops were sponsored and arranged. Don’t miss Michal Zajda explaining in his recent article how the fusion between æternity and the Bitcoin-NG protocol delivers a UX and technical leap in the everyday blockchain. Besides, did you hear that aeternity is among the nominees at the MCannabizWorld awards? The æproject is in the race for “Blockchain of the Year”!

By the way, æternity had previously announced a partnership with Uruguay’s Digital Party to build a new system to optimize the country’s democratic process and internal voting in a transparent and decentralized manner. As part of this partnership, a DApp based on the “liquid democracy” model will be created and would employ digital tokens and smart contracts for the internal governance of the Digital Party. Now, Microsoft-backed MIC partners with Aeternity to promote blockchain in Malta. Mass adoption is near! Importantly, the æcommunity is super-supportive, and the number of subscribers in social networks has a slight increase. Stay with us, and we will keep you informed!