Review on Aeternity by Troy Quessy

Name: Aeternity
Item: Aeternity
Rating: 4

September 20, 2018

Aeternity will support 3 VMs. (1) A version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine…

Aeternity will support 3 VMs. (1) A version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), (2) The Functional Typed Warded Virtual Machine (FTWVM) and (3) The High Level Machine (HLM). Each VM has a currently preferred smart contract language meaning Aeternity will offer more flexibility to developers who might want to design contracts with different trade offs. The result of this is that Aeternity can easily use Solidity → the current favourite of the EVM, Sophia → a typed functional language that compiles to FTWVM and Varna → a language similar to Bitcoin’s Script language that compiles to HLM.
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Pros

Uncontroversial changes to the blockchain may be easier / faster to make (and with no hard fork!). Many people will simply delegate their vote stake to someone very knowledgeable in the space, meaning if a relatively small number of actors agree on something they can quickly generate enough votes to reach the assigned threshold and enact the vote.

Cons

While I think it’s great Aeternity & other projects are experimenting with different on-chain governance models this is a very unexplored space. There are downsides and there are likely to be many unintended consequences some of which may not be desirable. Some risks / downsides