[ROADMAP] AETERNITY ROADMAP and RELEASE SCHEDULE Q4 2020 / Q1 2021

[lydia]

The Aeternity Foundation (AF) supports the aeternity protocol and ecosystem.

AF is happy to announce that the core developers team (core team) and the hyperchain developers team (hyperchain team) had joined forces to improved the aeternity ecosystem and make it even more healthy for the next evolution level.

Our goal is to make the aenode faster, better and lighter and the ae ecosystem more attractive for the users. The hyperchain network using the aenodes has been designed to attract the Aeternity enterprise customers and their users. On top of the faster aeternity network and hyperchain network the decentralized applications (dapps) can be run with higher performance and in a private context. Therefore the whole aeternity ecosystem will perform with higher availability, scalability, security and performance.

The Aeternity Foundation supports the Maintenance Application for the aeternity network. Weekly detail reports on the progress of the core team and hyperchain team can be found respectively in the forum under core and hyperchain development updates.

We are excited to announce the following aeternity release schedule and roadmap from December 2020 until March 2021:

Release 5.6

Released Date: 6.01.2021, see v5.6.0 and Release 5.6 Delay Information
Planned Released Date: 15.12.2020

Some of the important functionality improvements are the following:
• On-chain Protocol related bugs fixing
• Accept identical DB state
• Dead peer eviction
• Peer pool persistence
• Client endpoint for retrieving the peer pool status
• Decrease the reliance on centralized seed nodes for bootstrapping the node.
• Maintain and provide the community with the peer list for healthy networking.
• Upgraded Rocksdb
• Removed Windows Support
• Mitigation of a cyber attack

Releases 5.7 and 5.8

Release Date: 29.01.2021/01.02.2021 and 09.02.2021
Planned Released Date for Release 5.7: 15.01.2021.
Delay due to the cyber attacks in December 2020 and January 2021

Release 5.7 and Release 5.8 can be found on v5.7.1 and v5.8.0 respectively.
The documentation fork-resistance was updated on the 11.02.2021.

Main Features:
Important Security Improvements to prevent 51% attacks:
• The fork resistance against the long fork’s injection of n blocks , where n is a configuration parameter. This feature means that by configuration, ae nodes will reject any fork that goes deeper than n blocks from the top.
• The ‘finalized depth’ finalizes the latest fork resistance height in the database, ensuring that it is also enforced at restart. This means that a node should never sync with a node that has a different hash at FinalizedHeight, which will be n+1 blocks below the top. This imply that after n keyblocks on top of your transaction, you should be absolutely safe.

Postponed features:
• Hyperchain consensus implementation
• Launching the private hyperchain network for test

Release 5.9

Release Date: 2.03.2021/4.03.2021
Release 5.9 can be found on v5.9.1.

Features with a strong focus on HTTP Application Programming Interfaces (API):
• Introduce a new HTTP specification.
• Provide the infrastructure for having more than one API specification.
• Ensure a smooth transition from the old specification /v2/ to the new OAS3 one /v3/ by keeping both specification available.
• Upgrade the swagger specification from swagger2 to OAS3.
• Expand the /api endpoint with a key argument (i.e. ?oas3).

The goal is to work on the new API while providing SDKs and applications all the time they need to complete the migration. The features are useful for the possible implementation of a Rosetta API specification. Calling /api and /api?oas3 would provide the old and the new OAS3 API respectively.

Release 6.0 (Iris Hard Fork)

IRIS Release Process provides a detailed information about the process and the release features.
Postponed to Release Date: 13.04.2021
Release Candidate until 19.03.2021
Voting starting on the 15.03.2021
Planned Release Date: 25.02.2021
Important Condition: A positive result on community Iris Hard Fork Voting is required prior to the Release 6.0

Users, Node operators and Miners can experience higher performance for the creation of a new aenode compared to the present creation process using the archive nodes approach. The new sync process uses demand requests for the sync of the older node states. The newer Erlang Protocol OTP ensures aenode is running faster, better (bugs free) and more secure.

Main Features:
• Erlang Upgrade to OTP22 or OTP23 depending on the tests
• Fast Synchronization and related issues
• Beam sync - a radical optimization of fast sync was postponed for Q2 2021

Release 6.1

Release Date: 25.03.2021 for the private hyperchain, main and public are postponed for Q2 2021
Planned Released Date: 25.03.2021

Includes:
• Launching the Hyperchain network in two stages: Public and Main is postponed for Q2 2021. Only private hyperchain are deployed for testing.
• Bugs fixing if necessary

We believe that Aeternity Crypto Foundation can inspire financial, social and political innovation projects running on aeternity ecosystem.

Sponsors, Customers and User having an excellent idea how to contribute, use and improved the aeternity ecosystems are welcome to contact us under the Email: [email protected]

The updates on the Iris and Hyperchains will follow in the next topic Roadmap and Releases Q2.

[guantoulaoshi.chain]

I am very happy to see the rapid development of AE

[Winfield]

Hi lydia,could you please let us know the organizational structure,manpower resources and the future plan of AE team? So that we can make better Suggestions to the team. @lydia

[marco.chain]

what I would like to have is a short overview of new functionalities that developers can make us of after the hardfork. if I remember correctly there are a few things, e.g.:

• PayingForTx
• additional functions of the AENS interface

I somehow miss that information right now and hope this will be covered in the release notes

[lydia]

@All Thank you for the likes!

@Winfield Thank you very much for your interest in Aeternity Foundation (AF). Please find the relevant information on our AF web site https://www.aeternity-foundation.org
A large team was involved in the development on the ae platform (please see the the developers on the web site https://aeternity.com/#developer_tools). AF can provide a highly experience manpower for any enterprise project on the aeternity platform.

The aeternity ecosystem is continuously supported and promoted by AF. A detail information on the functionality included in the next releases will be provided to the forum and the GitHub repository as release notes. A roadmap for Q2, Q3 and Q4 2021 and next years will be timely presented in the forum. The community feedback is highly appreciated and needed for the aeternity ecosystems evolution.

@marco.chain In the iris hard fork are included:
• AENS: Review and simplify pointers #3282
• AENS: Increase the name expiry time #3280
• Deprecate AEVM properly for Iris #3151
@hanssv.chain Please fill free to add any information I missed in the AENS list above.

AF welcomes any feedback and proposal on how to make an aeternity one of the best blockchain systems.

[hanssv.chain]

Eventually it should all be gathered in the release notes… Possibly the best way to look at it now is to look at the iris milestone - note that there are both open and closed tickets/issues.

This includes more advanced crypto operations (including pairing operations, etc), PayingForTx, AENS.update, new string functions in FATE/Sophia, “catching” remote contract call errors, transaction introspection in generalized accounts authorization code, and more things that I have probably forgotten about…

[Winfield]

@lydia Hi lydia,thanks for your kind reply,sometimes we can see some other kinds of the coins is hiring a lot positions includes Engineering,Business development,Marketing,Operation and others,
Such as Chain link labs (https://chainlinklabs.com/careers )is hiring more than 40 opening positions. Does Aeternity have a hiring plan to expand the team?

[lydia]

@Winfield Thank you for the reply. AF has an agile approach for the team extension depending on the needs of the enterprise projects. My long time experience is that a large team has a lot of communications overhead and does not provide the desired results on time. So we prefer small teams with excellent experts who know how to make the things working. Our core and hyperchain teams are dedicated higher professional teams building an excellent aeternity technology. AF will happily support any enterprise proposal demonstrating the higher quality of the aeternity software system. So please fill free to contact us and submit a grant application.

[Winfield]

@lydia Hi lydia, thanks for the reply.Now more and more people in the community think that AE’s business development, market and operation are too poor. Those who bought AE tokens had lost a lot of money, and fewer and fewer people pay attention to it from the social media data ( Twitter,Facebook,reddit, China community ect) due to the low prices. Does AE have any plan to strengthen the business development, market and operation in the near future?

[lydia]

Thanks to everyone for believing in aeternity!

@Winfield Thank you for sharing with us your concerns. Yes, there is a plan how to improve the software as well the overall performance of the aeternity network. From my point of view we need to concentrate on more impactful aeternity marketing for gaining large enterprise projects. The ambassadors and the grant application programs are supported by AF.

Therefore I expect next year the investments curve will move fast in the positive direction. Since presently the ae price is lower it is reasonable now to invest.

AF believes a good time for aeternity is coming in the near future.

[dimitar.chain]

@lydia

we need to concentrate on more impactful aeternity marketing for gaining large enterprise projects

I agree on 100% with this. Having big enterprise relying on the infrastructure would surely bring all types of users (big and small).

[nikitafuchs.chain]

@hanssv.chain, would you put together a list of the updates relevant to those building on AE? Do we get failsafe calls, etc. ? What else ? The GH list is a little bit… flashy

[Winfield]

Hi @nikitafuchs.chain,What is GH list? Those buildings on AE you mentioned above means the ecosystems application on AE?

[ae-omar]

@Winfield GH means Github

[hanssv.chain]

@hanssv.chain

This includes more advanced crypto operations (including pairing operations, etc), PayingForTx , AENS.update, new string functions in FATE/Sophia, “catching” remote contract call errors, transaction introspection in generalized accounts authorization code, and more things that I have probably forgotten about…

I’m sure by some definition of list this (^^) is a list I don’t currently have the time to do a more elaborate description, sorry.

[lydia]

Please read the Release 5.6 Delay Information.

[Winfield]

Hi @lydia, We think the AE leadership should visit the other currencies official website which make a good development, and view what the functions and applications they have, view how they are doing, especially the mainstream currency showing up in the search results, and view what functions and applications they have developed ,just in the terms of support language view, we think AE is inferior to others, for example, most currencies official website are to support multiple languages, and AE only supports English. The community thinks AE should try to seize market opportunities, develop some unique features and applications, if AE can develop some functions and applications that others didn’t have and heavy used by the market, we think that the market will be rapid development, In this way, the market value of AE will be get higher, and as the market value is higher, AE will have more funds to invest in development and applications, and will become better and better, thus forming a virtuous cycle.

[beijing]

团队格局太差了。教不来的。