Yanislav (CEO) is one of the earliest ethereum developers and core eth team member (he calls himself even “godfather of ethereum” https://medium.com/@yanislav/king-of-bitcoin-godfather-of-ethereum-a9af9ecf56d5
PoW+PoS hybrid consensus algorithm will use Cuckoo Cycle as PoW which is energy efficient and runs on RAM. They claim even smartphones can mine ae in the future. Delegated voting will be used for PoS governance.
This blockchain will use “oracles” as tamper proof data bridges which contracts can act upon. Contracts can pull real world data like the price of real world assets(ie gold), election results, weather conditions etc.
State channels are offchain solutions, not a real essential breaktrough though but it’s important for businesses.
Erlang has been used in aeternity’s architecture.
AE is still ERC20 now which will be swapped to its native infrastracture coins, its ICO had two phases (april and june 2017). First phase price was $0.042 and second was $0.28 per token. (I contributed in both phases)
Long wait for token distribution, lots of corporate tragedy (two CTOs have been fired, first one Zack is also one of the creators of aeternity’s whitepaper, and he is one of the earliest characters in cryptosphere but he acted very unprofessional on the process IMHO- childish hack threats on medium posts etc, he’s now making his own project called AMOVEO)
It has a high level, OCaml based scripting language called Sophia which can be formally verified. It has also a simpler language called Varna. Both will support contracts and oracles.
It will have its own dapps called aepps, not sure how much developer support can it take. Their team is quite competent indeed. (They have few PhD erlang devs)
Euro-centered project, no asian hype, at least for now.
Despite all of its corporate tragedy ae price has done well since ICO, I believe Yani’s strong ethereum connections are responsible in that.
They must be in an independent security audit these days, after that mainnet release and token swap will be expected.
Conclusion
The only real competitor of AE will be its oldest CTO’s solo project Amoveo which lacks a market existence, for now.
