æternity — A Blockchain for All

4 min readJul 29, 2024

What is æternity and what does it solve?

æternity is an L1 blockchain with a vibrant ecosystem that offers transparent governance, efficiency, and global scalability for smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps). After a successful crowd sale and ICO of its AE coin in 2017, the æternity blockchain mainnet was launched in November 2018.

The main problem that æternity is solving is smart contract scalability. This is particularly relevant currently, given the bottlenecks that we have experienced last year for more established smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum. æternity is solving this by combining 4 powerful pieces of technology:

State channel： These are where the smart contracts will exist off the main blockchain. The only time that these state channels will communicate with the æternity blockchain is in settlement or in the case of any sort of disagreement between the smart contract participants.
FATE VM: The Fast Æternity Transaction Engine uses a higher level of abstraction and automatically minimizes error with type checking, delivering a simpler, easier, and safer programming environment.
Sophia: Sophia is a functional Smart Contract language in the ML family with built-in higher-level blockchain concepts like oracles, state channels, names, and more. It allows developers to abstract on a higher level than other blockchain programming languages.
Integrated oracles： In the æternity ecosystem, there’s no need for third-party oracles, as any user is empowered to register and use on-chain oracles, which saves on fees.

Token Overview

Token name: Aeternity
Token symbol:AE/USDT
Total supply:Incirculation

The AE coin (formerly also AE token or aeon) is the native currency of the æternity blockchain. The most basic transaction is the spend transaction used to transfer AE coins from sender to receiver. The receiver can either be an account, oracle or smart contract. In addition to coin transfers and smart contract calls, a sender can also attach an arbitrary binary payload, which can for example be used for proof of existence, registering a hash or file on the blockchain.

AE coins are required for any operation on the æternity blockchain as a transaction or “gas fee”. For smart contract calls, every state transition caused by such a transaction has a computational complexity, both in terms of storage size and execution, and given that we are building an open, permissionless network, we need to measure and possibly regulate the amount of computation used. We refer to this measure as “gas” and each block has a maximum amount of gas it can contain. This gas must be bought via the AE coin and therefore only accounts with enough coins can submit valid transactions, although it is possible to author transactions on behalf of others. All gas, or simply fees, is paid to miners.

What are the strengths of æternity?

Universal：The æternity protocol is capable of supporting anything that first-generation Smart Contract platforms can and more.
Decentralized: With Satoshi’s legacy at its core, the æternity protocol is built to be decentralized.
Secure: æternity was built with security in mind. The reference implementation is written in Erlang, following all standards of high-quality software engineering.
Public and private: While by default all on-chain transactions are public on æ mainnet with state-channels private transactions are possible. With the new Hyperchains upgrade private æternity-style chains (e.g. for consortiums) will become real.
Scalable:To scale to billions of users and transactions, the æternity protocol provides trustless off-chain scaling with State Channels technology.
User friendly:The protocol-incorporated Aeternity Naming System (AENS) enables users to point human-readable names to accounts, contracts, oracles, NFTs and more.
Open source:The æternity protocol and all essential developer resources are fully open-source. There are no proprietary licenses whatsoever.
Transparent governance: The æternity protocol is governed by miners, AE coin users and developers. AE coin holders can vote on a regular basis about changes of the software system. Everyone’s voice in the ecosystem should be and is considered.
Low transaction fees: æternity is equipped with native transaction types for managing State Channels, Oracles, and Names, among others. They are all optimized in terms of gas costs. Transactions and Smart Contract executions in State Channels don’t incur any fees. Since all Smart Contracts are executed in the highly efficient FATE VM, less gas is needed overall. A FATE contract is only 10% of the size of an EVM contract.

The future

The æternity project is no doubt quite an ambitious one. The project aims to solve some of the most important issues that are plaguing blockchain technology currently. Having state channel smart contracts and decentralised oracles means that numerous enterprises can enter contracts without worry of bottlenecks and privacy.

æternity also seems to be moving ahead at a steady pace as the regular updates and commits can lay testament to. One can also appreciate the highly skilled team members that are forging ahead on the æternity project. It seems to be one of the most qualified blockchain project teams.

æternity Official Media

Website | Telegram

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