Pursuing a Decentralised World with Aeternity

In conversation with the “Godfather of Ethereum”

Yanislav Malahov, Founder and CEO of Æternity, is considered a bit of a celebrity in this industry thanks to his involvement in the Ethereum project. Yani is commonly referred to as the “Godfather of Ethereum” as he worked closely with Vitalik Buterin on a project during the initial stages of Ethereum.

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Yani then founded Æternity, with the goal of increasing the speed, reliability, and scalability of Blockchains by processing smart contracts in state channels, similar to side-chains. In our conversation with him, he shared with us some very valuable insights about his journey and his vision for India.

Some salient points of our conversation

Our conversation with Yanislav Malahov touched upon some insightful topics from pseudo-democratic governance, to Micro-blocks, to his vision for Æternity and India. Here are some interesting takeaways from the conversation:

The journey of Æternity.

• They started the Æternity project by registering a company with Ether as the base capital in Lichtenstein in late 2016.
• The following year in a public token sale when they sold 80% of their AE tokens and ended up receiving 200,000 Ether and some bitcoin to fund the community development and further improvements on the blockchain.
• What Æternity brings to the game is essentially a solution for the scalability issue in the popular smart contract platforms.

• Where bitcoin offers only 14 transactions (at the time) and Ethereum almost double that, it became clear that there wasn’t nearly enough for the world
• Æternity’s primary goal was to improve this scalability issue using state chains.
• With the launch of the naming system with the last hard fork, it becomes possible to send tokens or digital items to meaningful human names, like domain names of sorts.

Use-Cases for Æternity in India

• Another focal point for Æternity was how the network would be governed by participants of the network to make decisions about the future of the network.
• With Æternity this governance is done in a weighted delegated manner where you can delegate your voting powers.
• This also opens up avenues for prediction markets where you could be rewarded for a favourable outcome of hard forks.
• This infrastructure that Æternity is creating would essentially create a synergetic environment for Voting, Betting, and Mining to bring about a sense of “wisdom of the crowd” or consensus of sorts.
• A brilliant use-case for this, especially in India, turns up in the Governance system. Imagine a system of governance with direct democracy, where “One nose equals One Vote”.

“ I find it a joke when we make two crosses on a piece of paper every four years and call it democracy” — Yanislav Malahov

• Uruguay Use Case: There is a significant public interest to upgrade the social fabric by leveraging this technology as can be demonstrated by a digital political party in Uruguay which is already using this system of governance.
• There are also other countries that are moving towards direct democracy governance, like Switzerland, who’ve successfully implemented this on a communal and government level for quite some time now.
• This system also solves the loss of votes, miscounting, manipulation, and could even reduce corruption significantly.

How is Æternity different

• A very fundamental foundation for any smart contract platform is its programming language.
• With Ethereum’s Solidity, it was created by enthusiasts and not by experienced programming language creators and thus falls short in certain respects, which anyone with expertise in language theory or experience in developing would second.
• Æternity, on the other hand, uses a functional programming algorithm called Sofia, using formal proofs for verification created with the involvement of experienced language creators.

• By creating micro blocks in between the key blocks enables the network to reach a sooner consensus.
• This resembles proof of stake and improves scalability in the sense that it starts with one leader and cascades on into a set of leaders which results in very fast transactions.

Æternity’s Vision for India

• Æternity has funded several projects in the direction of developer and entrepreneurial education, one of which is an incentivized online peer-to-peer blockchain learning platform where you can earn AE tokens.
• The approach for India as far as building the Æternity Community is concerned is mainly through AE ventures and their Starfleet India program.
• After the first two editions of the Starfleet program were held in Sofia (Bulgaria) and Malta, Starfleet India was the third in this series of accelerators for startups utilizing Æternity blockchain.

• Applicants were mentored on how to pitch, present, and build their product.
• They were also exposed to the global ecosystem of Æternity and their EMEA and EU market partners.
• This brings an opportunity for acceleration, learning, and even funding for startups, developers, and entrepreneurs, all you need is an idea and the motivation to be involved in this groundbreaking technology.

About IBC Media

IBC Media is a marketing solutions company that works with emerging technology companies. Co-founded by Raghu Mohan, CEO and Kaavya Prasad, COO, IBC Media in 2018, the company offerings include Accelerator activation, Public Relations, Marketing Growth, and Corporate Events.

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Hard Fork Specials has been devised as a shorter version of our talk show which we will undertake to highlight either a burning or important topic, a new technology, a special set of people or if we come across something special to showcase from the global crypto and blockchain scene.

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Hard Fork is India’s first TV Talk show dedicated to Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. With this show, we want to raise awareness, inspire learning, showcase achievements, discover innovations, provide advocacy, find solutions, and answer questions about #Blockchain and #Cryptocurrencies. Season 1 — Getting India Started up on Crypto and Blockchain — and a special series on Women in Blockchain has been being aired on the *founderINDIA TV platform on Amazon Fire TV and also simultaneously cast on its YouTube and Facebook channels.

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