Æternity

How we helped blockchain innovator æternity scale to billions.

The company

æternity is an open-source, distributed computing platform that builds on decentralised cryptographic P2P technology. æternity has partnered with Erlang Solutions to scale its distributed system and peer-to-peer network and bring its blockchain technology to the masses.

Scalability issues continue to plague modern blockchains, innovative, comprehensible, and truly revolutionary solutions must be pursued if æternity was ever to achieve widespread adoption. We are thrilled to collaborate with Erlang Solutions to work towards overcoming these challenges.

Yanislav Malahov Founder of æternity

The challenge

Founded in 2016 by Yanislav Malahov, known in some circles as “the Godfather of Ethereum”, æternity is designed to deliver productivity, transparent governance, and global scalability. æternity raised approximately 29 million CHF in its campaign to offer blockchain technology with a consensus mechanism that is as efficient and cost-effective as possible.

Programming complex relationships for a global user base, æternity needed to handle large volumes of products and information in parallel. They also wanted to design a unique state channel to enable the off-chain verification of data and smart contracts, allowing for all transactions to be independent of each other, thereby increasing transaction speed and scalability while also ensuring increased privacy.

The solution

æternity reached out to Erlang Solutions for support in scaling æternity’s distributed system and peer-to-peer network by providing fault tolerant systems capable of scaling to billions of potential users.

For this æternity intends to utilize Erlang, the domain specific language, to drive the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology. The partnership between æternity and Erlang Solutions will also strive to tackle consensusrnmechanism-related challenges, which are widely identified as problematic for blockchain developers.

The result

By partnering with Erlang Solutions, æternity has fast-tracked it’s specialisation in it’s programming language of choice, Erlang. Today, æternity’s runs proof of concepts for most of its key concepts in Erlang. This includes the blockchain itself, the contract language and VM, the oracle and governance mechanisms, as well as an old version of the consensus mechanism. æternity continues to use and value Erlang/OTP because it allows their team to write code that can respond to many requests in parallel and without crashing.

The servers with the highest uptime in the world are based on Erlang. It has been used for industrial applications for 30 years, proving itself to be a reliable and stable product. Beyond Erlang, æternity also has a growing Elixir team who are exploring blockchain development in Elixir. Erlang Solutions has integrated it’s expert Erlang consultants and architects into the æternity team to support them in building a truly scalable blockchain technology.