Aion: Building Blockchain Bridges.

October 9, 2017

Interview with Sam Pajot-Phipps Head of Operations At Aion.

Aion is a Third Generation Blockchain Network. It tackles three unresolved challenges of blockchains: scalability, privacy, and interoperability.

Why interconnect blockchains?

The Aion project is being led by Nuco, an enterprise blockchain company. Nuco has worked over the past two years with numerous clients building production-grade enterprise blockchain networks. From our experience in the enterprise industry and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance we understand the obstacles enterprises face to adopt production level blockchain systems and their requirements for them to be effective.

Many of these obstacles such as scalability, interoperability and privacy are also challenges being faced by public blockchains. We believe that building a network to effectively interconnect public, consortium and private blockchains will create the catalyst for long-term mainstream blockchain adoption.

Who are the potential clients of Aion?

Aion will be partnering with key public, and enterprise blockchain networks to build the foundation of the Aion network. Most notably, Moog Inc, a fortune 1000 manufacturing company has announced its intention to build on top of Aion.

Link: https://blog.aion.network/moogaionpartnership-6d37ce15b2fd

What are the differences between other systems such as Polka Dot, Melon, etc which offer the same functionality and Aion?

The blockchain interoperability space has gained the interest of multiple blockchain projects to try and solve one of the critical obstacles for widespread blockchain adoption. The number of projects working to solve this problem statement speaks to its immense importance for the blockchain networks of today and the future technological infrastructure of tomorrow.

Aion is not only building a network to connect disparate blockchains together, but also create the infrastructure to launch powerful decentralized applications that can operate across the Aion connected network.

This recent blog post highlights Aion approach and advantage: https://blog.aion.network/aionadvantage-913704587592

Are Aion Bridges similar to atomic swaps?

The Aion network utilizes bridges to connect blockchain networks. Instead of a centralized entity or contract managing transactions and state changes between networks, the bridge itself is decentralized. The bridge utilizes a lightweight BFT consensus algorithm to validate, sign and propagate transactions across networks. Each bridge can also be viewed as its own product.

Aion network participations such as developers, enterprises and other protocols are encouraged and incentivized to connect their own or other blockchain networks by building a bridge. The fee structure and features of these bridges can then be customized based on market demand or segments. As an example, we envision multiple bridges connecting the same two networks, each one offering their own unique features such as a low fee structure and high throughput and others providing transaction obfuscation.

What is the utility of the Aion token?

Aion 1- Operations

Aion-1 blockchain is powered by the AION token. Token holders can stake and back the Aions Validators.

Blockchain Software Applications

The Aion-1 VM Virtual Machine is powered by the Aion Token. AVM is used as “gas”.

Interchain Bridges

In order to instantiate a bridge from Aion-1 to any participating blockchain, AION tokens must be staked into a bridge registry contract. Once built, other nodes can join the bridge by also staking AION tokens. Fees for inter-chain transactions are set by bridges, and distributed to the validators on those bridges.

Participating Blockchains

Aion can create other blockchains and these are powered by the Aion token

What is the Aion timeline?

Phase 1:

Interchain communication and bridging infrastructure.
Updated PoS consensus algorithm.
Bridging and interchain communication functionality

Phase 2:

Creation of the Aion Virtual Machine and Aion scripting language

Phase 3:

Creating fast, efficient interchain communication and interchain applications.

Please find the visualized Roadmap at: aion.network

Can you share details on the Aion pre-sale?

Our pre-sale is currently underway, with great interest from across the community. The pre-sale will continue until the USD $15 M soft cap is reached (initiating a 4 hour countdown) or until October 10th UTC 1400.

We have recently clarified the benefits of the Token Release Schedule (available to pre-sale participants), along with our token supply and hard caps.
https://blog.aion.network/hardcaptrsupdate-73060ab33cfc

Pre-sale participants that have contributed to the Token Release Schedule have a guaranteed 175% bonus in redistributed tokens from the TRS.