æternity Technology - acetronaut/wiki GitHub Wiki
The innovation in æternity is the creation of a highly scalable blockchain architecture with a built-in Proof-Of-Work (POW) and Proof-Of-Stake (POS) consensus mechanism, which is also used to check the oracle. This hybrid system makes the oracle very efficient because it avoids layering one consensus mechanism on top of another. State channels are integrated into the blockchain and are the de facto layer for the execution of smart contracts. This increases both the privacy and scalability. Tokens inside the state channels can be transferred using purely functional smart contracts that can access oracle answers. By not storing the contract code or state on-chain, æternity is able to make smart contracts easier to analyze and faster to process in parallel, with no substantial loss to functionality. Applications like markets for synthetic assets and prediction markets can be efficiently implemented at global scale.
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INDUSTRIAL GRADE CODE BASE
The core æternity blockchain code is written in Erlang, which makes it easy to write distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time and highly available non-stoppable applications. Erlang is the perfect choice to write a blockchain from scratch allowing to achieve superior operational stability and performance. |
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BLOCKCHAIN NETWORKS
The æternity blockchain technology is free to use and easy to incorporate. MIT-licensed modules will allow easy implementation in blockchain consortiums and will enable free and open access for developers to be able to build on the æternity platform. Cross-chain atomic swaps do the rest. |
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AE TOKEN
Aeons (AE) are the access tokens to the æternity network and act as a unit of account for the resources (Space and computation time) spent on æternity. Furthermore, æons are the energy for any application implemented on the platform. The initial amount of AE for the genesis block will be determined by a verifiable smart contract on Ethereum. |
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SMART CONTRACTS
State channels enable highly scalable, trustless transactions of value and purely functional, easily verifiable Turing-complete smart contracts. State channels effortlessly support an immense throughput of transactions. The execution of the smart contracts as well as the settlement happens off-chain. In other words: They are one-to-one sidechains, where the blockchain acts as a public crypto court only used for disagreement resolution. |
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ORACLES
A crucial feature for most contracts, whether encoded as text or as code, is the ability to refer to values from the environment and access to real-world data. The æternity Oracle Machine provides real-world data to the blockchain in an integrated way. Each user can ask questions about the environment. Everybody can answer. The consensus mechanism comes into play in case of disagreement. |
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NAMES (DNS)
In the vein of Aaron Swartz’ work and Namecoin, æternity features an easy to use name system that is both decentralized and secure, while still supporting human-friendly, memorable names. The blockchain’s state includes a mapping from unique human-friendly strings to fixed-size byte arrays, which are individually customizable. |
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ACCOUNTS & IDENTITY
æternity's accounts are permission-less, but still allow customization via schema.org's semantic web scheme. Create and own your identity on the æternity network, then use it everywhere on the web! |
