ICO City #2 - Aeternity

ICO City #2

Welcome to the second post on ICO City, where I try to give you a quick rundown and rating of the next upcoming ICO and the idea behind it.
For anyone not "in the know", ICO stands for "initial coin offering" and is a way of crowdfunding Alts and solving the problem of intitial coin distribution.
The devs sell coins (basically shares) of their project to fund it, and the backers invest their hard earned crypto either b/c they believe in the project's future or b/c they're trying to flip their shares as soon as the coin hits exchanges to (hopefully) make a quick buck.

In this ICO City post we will be talking about Aeternity (Phase 2).

Before we start, a short disclaimer: I'm merely a trainee in the financial sector NOT a financial advisor, so take everything you read here w/ a grain of salt and do your own research before investing. That said, even if I WERE an actual financial advisor you should still do your own research.

A. What is Aeternity?

Aeternity provides an improved way to do smart contracts (= decentralized trustless applications), by providing a highly scalable architecture and the ability to check (against) real world events by implementation of the oracle (a mechanism that tells the blockchain facts about our world).
The second contribution campaign starts on May the 29th, at around 3:00 PM GMT - a countdown is provided at www.aeternity.com
Contributions can be made using Ether, BTC or fiat currency.
Aeternity will be going into the SECOND phase of contribution w/ an amount of over 121.000 ETH and 323 BTC already raised.

B. What info does the Whitepaper provide?

Attention: This is NOT a comprehensive summary of the whitepaper due to it being so information-heavy (in contrast to the last whitepaper discussed)!
Even though it being only ten pages, the whitepaper appears rather daunting at first, throwing a lot of tech terms at the potential reader; a short glossary at the end is provided.
Aeternity proclaims to build upon features of Ethereum, Truthcoin, Namecoin and Factom and to improve upon them through higher scalability, scripting and implementation of a consensus mechanism in tandem w/ the oracle.
The use of state channels enables trustless transactions that have to be agreed upon by both parties of the transaction. If a disagreement arises the blockchain enforces the last agreed upon state, providing both parties w/ a failsafe.
To use the blockchain itself or any services provided one has to pay w/ Aeons, tokens similar in use to Ethereums Gas. Initial Aeons will be distributed through the ICO, further Aeon will be generated through mining (which will be possible to do via smartphone).
The whitepaper furthermore goes into a lot of detail on its state channels, the consensus mechanism (which is a hybrid of PoW and PoS), governance (consensus finding via prediction markets) and scalability.

C. What are the potential uses of Aeternity?

The whitepaper talks about several possible uses, mainly those involving the combination of the oracle and the consensus mechanisms. For example the implementation of event contracts, in the form of insurances- we bet that a negative event happens, if it does we receive a certain amount of money - or to incentivize whistleblowing.
Other potential uses are providing insured crowdfunding, mimicking real world assets (e.g. gold) etc.

D. Last but not least, should I participate in the ICO?

Aeternity seems like a very ambitious project, with a lot of great ideas and cool innovations. The high transparency and the fact that it's already in its second phase add a layer of trustworthiness.
I highly advise anyone interested in the project to check out the whitepaper and the homepage!

This is it for our second ICO rundown! I hope the information in this post was of value to you! Next time we are going to tackle Wagerr.
Feel free to share and comment, and if this was of interest to you please consider tipping!

BTC tip jar: 1EP1ZWDWgq85o5YKB2apwGgBY3Rs1ovWbz
ETH tip jar: 0x5176bd1293528ca3d24c2c39cadf5df59bf01c61

Thanks for reading and see you next time!