Engineered to scale and last, æternity is an easily accessible blockchain platform for the global public. With numerous innovative functionalities and performance far ahead of earlier blockchains, æternity allows its users and community to seamlessly venture into the new era of society, economy, and digital interactions.

Founded in 2016 by Yanislav Malahov, the æternity blockchain project was born out of a desire for a more fair Internet supported by scalable, open-source and cryptographic software, with a commitment to technical excellence. æternity blockchain itself launched as the public æternity mainnet in 2018. It is now a blossoming community of enthusiasts supported via the Aeternity Foundation .

This is why the community set up a clear Vision, Mission, and Community Values charter.

With the æternity Hyperchains consensus upgrade ( coming soon via governance ) æternity mainnet will be able to scale further on-chain as well as allow everyone to launch their own private (or public) æternity-style sidechain without asking anyone for permission. Hyperchains consensus will piggyback on the PoW of the Bitcoin blockchain to create a secure tamperproof random number to secure each hyperchain. Read the related whitepaper .

State Channels make it possible to execute smart contracts off-chain. The blockchain enforces the smart contract code only in the case of a disagreement between the contracting parties. Unlike most blockchains, æternity’s core protocol was re-engineered specifically so it can accommodate State Channels on the protocol and smart contract language level, making it easier to build applications for global-scale use cases requiring huge numbers of instant and private transactions without compromising on the security of a public blockchain.

On æternity, Oracles are managed by special types of transactions. They can be programmed to request and provide data from information providers and APIs, empowering your blockchain apps with real world data. Having Oracles available on-chain improves security, reduces cost and eliminates the need for third-party solutions.

æternity is equipped with native transaction types for managing State Channels, Oracles, and Names, among others. They are all optimized in terms of gas costs. Transactions and Smart Contract executions in State Channels don't incur any fees. Since all Smart Contracts are executed in the highly efficient FATE VM, less gas is needed overall. A FATE contract is only 10% of the size of an EVM contract.

Sophia allows developers to abstract on a higher level than other blockchain programming languages. Sophia is a functional Smart Contract language in the ML family with built-in higher level blockchain concepts like oracles, state-channels, names and more. Sophia is strongly-typed and has a restricted mutable state. Want to learn more? Watch some videos , or explore the links in this section.