Review on Aeternity by Soren Laramée

Name: Aeternity
Item: Aeternity
Rating: 4

September 20, 2018

Aeternity have stated they are planning to use a variant of Bitcoin-NG…

Aeternity have stated they are planning to use a variant of Bitcoin-NG (already implemented in the Waves cryptocurrency) as their consensus algorithm. Bitcoin-NG will bring significant improvements in transactions per second on the Aeternity base protocol, the team have estimated 100tps onchain (this does not include any transactions in state channels).
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Pros

Aeternity is a smart contract platform much like Ethereum but with 4 key differentiators. In general, Aeternity has taken a lot of 2nd layer solutions for smart contract blockchains (State Channels, Governance, Oracles, Naming) and attempted to place them as first class objects meaning they are fundamental to the blockchain and not a 2nd layer abstraction. This general design principle has a few advantages.

Cons

Aeternity is using a hybrid Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) approach. Only miners will receive inflation rewards while PoS is being used exclusively for governance (I’d argue it’s not PoS at all in this case and Aeternity should not state it is).