Aeternity Revealed its Upcoming Network Update

In a blog post from last week, Aeternity published their plans for the next scheduled hard fork in September, which will include the Lima release. Lima will encompass aeternity’s customized virtual machine – the Fast aeternity Transaction Engine (FATE).

As noted in the blog post:

“The Fast æternity Transaction Engine uses transactions as its basic operations and operates directly on the state tree of the æternity chain. This enables native integration with first class objects such as oracles, a naming system, and state channels since those are all managed by specific types of transactions described on the protocol level.”

FATE will be an easier to use machine language that should be better than traditional byte-code virtual machines currently used on other platforms. It will offer easier safe coding, will need smaller code sizes, smaller transactions, provide developer-friendly error messages, new types of contract calls and return values and even, offer a different gas-pricing model. The whole FATE development effort was led by Dr. Erik Stenman, Tobias Lindahl and Dr. Ulf Norell.

Aeternity will also introduce a governance mechanism that is based on the Sophia functional smart contract language and FATE is built to easily integrate with it. This mechanism will lessen the community efforts to launch governance votes. They will offer a delegated voting and signaling instrument for hardfork activation and a governance aepp.

The developer community will then focus on enabling “signaling” that would automate the hardfork activation process through a key header info field. It will contain information that would be set by miners via configuration parameters. This info would serve as a signal whether this specific miner supports a proposed hardfork.

The launch of Lima will also mark the kickoff of all auctions for renting names in the aethernity Naming System (AENS). AENS will allow human-readable names for AE token accounts, as well as oracles and smart contracts. At the moment, more than 550k names have been registered for free as it is possible to connect an account with a test name (.test).

An auction system will be incorporated to ensure fair distribution of names and a reasonable price for the most valuable names. These efforts will be led by Michal Zajda and will be executed by a Sophia smart contract.

What is important is that all AE tokens holders must migrate their tokes to the Mainnet not later that September 2^nd because the smart contract that manages all Ethereum AE token will expire on that date. All Ethereum AE tokens will be non-transferable after this date so all users should migrate their AE tokens. Detailed information concerning people that are not able to migrate before September 2^nd will be announced soon by Aeternity.

Another thing forthcoming on September 20-21 is the aeternity Universe One conference in Prague which will introduce a mobile aepp that will enable state channel payments during the conference. Other valuable updates mentioned in the blog post include AirDrop, Stratum, Virtual State Channels (VSC) and Native Tokens (NT).