The Developers and Development of æternity

aetrnty (41)in #blockchain • 6 years ago (edited)

The æternity development team has more than 100 years of coding collectively behind them. Now we present some of the superstars that make up the æternity team, along with some updates about what they have been working on recently and what's in store for the coming months.

Erik Stenman, Erlang Developer.
Erik has been programming for fun since 1980 and was one of the driving forces behind the High Performance Erlang project (HiPE) from its beginnings in 1996. In his Ph.D. work, he implemented an efficient native code compiler, compiling from the Erlang VM BEAM code into native machine code. Erik was also involved in establishing the Engineering Department at Klarna. In his (limited!) spare time he is writing a book about the Erlang Runtime system.

Ulf Wiger, Erlang Developer.
Ulf became one of the first commercial users of Erlang when he bought a license in 1993. In 1996, he joined Ericsson and became Chief Designer of the AXD 301 development, arguably the most complex system ever built in Erlang. In recent years, Ulf has been involved in products based on the AXD 301 architecture, and has been an active member of the Open Source Erlang community. In February 2009 he became CTO of Erlang Solutions.

Thomas Arts, PhD, Erlang Developer.
Thomas is a senior scientist and Erlang expert. He worked with Joe Armstrong, the inventor of Erlang, at the Computer Science lab in the 1990s. Thomas holds over 20 years’ experience in programming Erlang, as well as strong scientific experience. He has good literacy in theoretical computer science, with a strong capacity to engage with complex scientific papers. He also has the ability to translate scientific theory in practical applications. He is one of the main developers of the QuickCheck testing tool.

Key points of the new releases.
In recent weeks, the development team has been focused on improving sync speeds, fixing some stability issues with the sync protocol, and smart contracts. You can check out æternity's detailed development roadmap on Pivotal tracker and the contribution of the GitHub code in Epoch here.

Release v0.11.1 was a point release that fixed some stability issues with the sync protocol, a new consensus protocol version. This release also improved the stability of the Testnet, and allowed support for incompatible backward changes of the consensus protocol (hard forking) without restarting the blockchain from Genesis. See here for more information.

Release v0.12.0 was focused on faster sync, this release changed the sync strategy, making it possible to sync a chain much more efficiently (by focusing on syncing with individual forks instead of simply syncing with individual peers), and impacted the consensus by adding a payload to spend transactions. It also improved the chain representation, by keeping track of fork points. It reduced the need for block-by-block traversals, which in turn sped up many chain operations. See here for the release notes.

Release v0.13.0 was focused on Smart Contracts and State Channel MVPs, adding channel functionality, and changed the cryptographic signature to use Curve25519 which makes all the old node/signature keys unusable. This release also positively impacted consensus by applying contiguous nonces for transactions from the same account, applying a positive transaction for all transactions. This release also improved the stability of the Testnet and added functionality to Smart Contracts that allows for the execution of non-trivial Solidity and Sophia Smart Contracts. Finally, a first version of the Varna syntax and a compiler for that syntax were also added. See here for the release notes.

Release v0.14.0 is a maintenance release, impacting the consensus and changing the miner's reward to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 atto-Aeternity-tokens. It also moved contract account balances to the account state tree and removed the height and contract ID from contract state trees. In addition, it changes the format of the state channel's on-chain close mutual transaction. In this release consensus was also impacted because the miner's account was added to the block's header, which eliminates the coinbase transaction and the ability to query from the HTTP API which blocks were mined by a specific miner. This moves the allocation of the block mining reward to the miner after the application of the tx in the block.

Stopping the use of hashes of unsigned transactions, instead it uses the hash of the signed transaction, which reduces the memory footprint of the system (removes an index) affecting the API by eliminating the transaction hash when constructing unsigned transactions, returning the hash of the transaction signed in all other applicable places. The latter should not affect the users of the API, since all transaction hashes are now constructed from the signed transaction. Note that this does not affect consensus, only the http and websocket APIs.

It improves the user's HTTP API by fine tuning paths for monitoring account balance and transactions and improves the user experience for Channels’ websockets by broadcasting co-signed on-chain transactions to participants before posting. This allows them to track the progress of transactions and store them locally in case they ever need to resolve a conflict. See here for the release notes information.

The system test suite is now implemented.
The development team has been working on creating a system test suite that would allow complex tests for P2P infrastructure to be run, identifying problems and fixing them. Now, with the test suite ready, the team is able to run elaborate tests that emulate various real-life scenarios. For the next few weeks, part of the team will be focused on creating such tests, so that we can be confident in the accuracy and stability of æternity’s network.

Mainnet launch is currently expected to happen in August, 2018.

æternity's brilliant dev team is building a blockchain protocol on the programming language that powers 90% of internet – Erlang.

Keep up with the development progress of these brilliant minds, the architects of a new type of digital reality, based on scalable, public and open-source blockchain technology.