What is Aeternity?: A Guide for Beginners

For even the staunchest proponents of blockchain technology, it is hardly a surprise that the various blockchain networks that are available to us grapple with a number of problems, ranging from scalability to speed to adoption.

Wouldn’t it be great if a fairy godmother could give us an easy fix for all those problems at once? It sure would, and it seems this is the idea that drove the developers of Aternity to develop the blockchain that they did.

In this beginner’s guide we will take a look at what it is, what its objectives are, and more.

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What is Aeternity?

Aeternity is a blockchain network developed to integrate the scalability solution in blockchain smart contracts.

It is a unique blockchain solution that seeks to solve a bunch of problems that we will discuss in the subsequent section.

According to the official website of the blockchain, Aeternity is:

“Aeternity is a new blockchain technology, designed to deliver unmatched efficiency, transparent governance and global scalability.”

What Are The Problems That Aeternity Tries to Solve?

Aeternity tries to take care of three major problems in blockchain, let’s see where they are.

1. Off-Chain Transactions

Often, having a whole bunch of unnecessary or irrelevant information recorded on a blockchain network, tends to slow it down.

This, in turn, affects the scalability of the network. Therefore, many blockchain solutions deal with developing a separate off-chain or side chain offering to handle the access.

However, even then, layering up off-chain and side chain networks on the original blockchain can cause technical difficulties.

Hence, a great solution would be to have an off-chain solution already incorporated as a part of the blockchain network, which is what Aeternity does.

2. Incorporating Real World Information to Make Smart Contracts More Accurate

For situation based smart contracts, having real life updates is incredibly important. For example, say somebody would like to book a ticket to a play only if the traffic that day is not too much.

Therefore, there should ideally be a mechanism to figure that bit out. What Aeternity does is, it tries to solve this problem by using the “Oracle” system, whereby a combination of two things determines the real world aspect of the whole smart contract.

One of these included technological points of contact, say updates from a traffic app.

The other one is also a crucial one: the element of users actually answering questions to make the smart contract stronger, in a way rather similar to how you answer questions on Google Maps about places you have visited.

3. A Stable Consensus Mechanism

Since the different consensus protocols used in blockchain have a lot of problems of their own, Aeternity combines Proof of Work and Proof of Stake protocols to get the best of both worlds and cancel out the problems.

About the Aeternity Token

The Aeternity Token exists to facilitate transactions within the network and has the ticker symbol AE.

It is usually available at most of the top cryptocurrency exchanges, mostly exchangeable for Bitcoin or Ethereum. It is an ERC-20 token compatible with several kinds of wallets.

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