Innovating with Blockchain and its ecosystem

Blockchains based on functional programming, including Erlang or Elixir, have become a hot topic where progress is being made. One of the leading projects in the space is æternity. They are innovating with a range of functional programming languages such as Erlang as to provide a solution to blockchain scalability and reliability challenges.

Our next special ‘blockchain edition’ meetup is organised jointly by æternity and Erlang Solutions and it will share talks by a team of well-known professionals from the blockchain community, including Emin, Nikita, Ulf and Thomas. RSVP and join us for a blockchain evening filled with industry’s insight, lots of pizza and some craft beers!

Schedule:

18:00: Welcome with pizza and drinks

18.30: Introduction into æternity Blockchain - Yanislv Malahov (founder, æternity) & Emin Mahrt (Chief Product Officer, æternity)

19.00: From Solidity to Sophia, Evolvement of smart contract languages - Nikita Fuchs

High level languages for smart contracts pose a challenge to their inventors: As blockchain protocols capable of executing smart contracts still rely on a very fundamental implementation of virtual machines running the code, one needs to do as many things with as little instructions as possible. As a relatively new component in computer science, the transaction costs per op-code force the language to be as thrifty as possible. Introducing innovations in such a complex environment is not easy. Although aeternity is built upon a quite similar principle as Ethereum, æternitys smart contract language offers a range of notable advantages and features developers strived for for a long time in Ethereum's Solidity language.

19.30: State channel on the æternity Blockchain - Ulf Wiger

State channels present one of the most exciting opportunities for scaling up performance on blockchains, but they have yet to take off in a big way. aeternity has chosen a slightly different approach to state channels, integrating them as first-class objects on the chain, and providing a proxy implementation of the complex protocol state machine.
In this talk, we describe the aeternity State channels through some examples, explain how we think they're different, and report on some early performance numbers.

20.00: An analysis of a blockchain security protocol - Thomas Arts

The æternity blockchain nodes communicate with each other using the Noise protocol. Noise is a kind of slimmed down version of TLS.
This relatively new security protocol is used, for example, by WhatsApp, WireGuard and Lightning. The libsodium C implementation for the cryptographic primitives forms the heart of this protocol.

In order to use Noise in Erlang, we use the Enacl library from Jesper Louis Andersen and the Enoise implementation of Hans Svensson. This in its turn is then used in an æternity specific protocol for synchronizing and gossiping transactions and blocks.

In this talk we present our security analysis of the Noise protocol implementation that we use for æternity.

About aeternity

æternity is a decentralised æpps platform. It scales through state channels that run smart contracts. It introduces a new language that supports formal verification and allows to write simpler, safer code. The VM accommodates compiled Solidity contracts. æternity uses an ASIC-resistant, memory-bound Proof-of-Work (PoW) with less than 15 seconds block time. It features an integrated naming system and oracles, which could be used to request and access data from various data providers.

About Erlang Solutions

Erlang Solutions is a global software consulting company working with clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500, including WhatsApp, AdRoll, Klarna, Pivotal, aeternity Blockchain to mention a few. We fix issues of scale, reliability & performance, and we optimise RabbitMQ too! We are proud of being a truly cultural mix of people working towards one goal - to spread the reach of Erlang and Elixir programming languages across the globe.