The State of Aeon 3_10_2019

5 min readMar 10, 2019

The long road ahead awaits the Aeon Community!

Hello everyone and welcome to the State of Aeon for March 10, 2019. In the past two weeks, we have seen some big changes in the possible direction of Aeon in the future. There was a community meeting and some developers were able to stop by and join in. The main topic of discussion was a Proof of Work change and many community members voiced their opinions on the direction of the project. Aside from this, we had a successful community giveaway of the RaspberryPi with 32 members joining. Let’s jump into the wrap-up of the past few weeks in the Aeon Community.

Community Meeting Wrap-up

On February 28th and March 1 we had our second community meeting. This meeting was very successful at gauging a direction for the project. For the past year, most major Cryptonote projects have been trying to figure out a way to combat ASICS with POW changes to kick ASICS off the network. Some projects have been pushing to be ONLY CPU friendly protocols while others have strived to be only GPU friendly protocols. Monero, on the other hand, wants to be CPU and GPU friendly and resistant to FPGA and ASICS and just had their successful fork to Cryptonight Random on 3_9_2019 booting 80–90% of their net hash off. During the meeting, Stoffu suggested a POW change to SHA3 or alike protocol, an ASIC and FPGA friendly POW. His arguments were that embracing this change would:

Allow Aeon to stand out from the rest of the CN community by being the first Cryptonight Light coin to use SHA3.
Allow Aeon to move away from its close following of Monero to give itself a unique existence.
Allow a test base for CN protocols on SHA3 for possible future integration of other CN projects.
Possibly increased interest of developers in the Aeon project.
Allow for possible value increase due to increased notoriety of the project.

Currently, SHA3 is a Keccak style hash and there are no known ASICS released to the public since released in 2015. There are some public FPGA blockstreams available for Keccak but there is a possibility they would not work for Aeon. This means that if Aeon were to switch to SHA3 with its own version, CPU and GPU mining would still be possible and most likely profitable for the time being. Nvidia GPU are currently known to be more efficient at Keccak than AMD. If you want to voice your thoughts, feel free to post them on the GitHub post HERE. Stoffu has stated that he will provide infrastructure set up for SHA3 Mining and Pool operations. Smooth has noted that he supports this change and that we have a large community interest in this change that was not expected at all. Some community members have spoken out in favor of this change HERE and HERE.

Aside from the POW change talk, full logs from the meeting on Feb 28th can be found on our community GitHub repo HERE in HTML format or HERE in markdown format. The followup meeting logs for March 1 are available HERE in markdown formatting. Also, full logs can be seen on our discord channels for both dates or for any past meeting.

AEON Translations Project

A small note from a few weeks ago is that we are starting this process for translating Aeon related material to additional languages. Currently aside from the core software wallets, only English is available. We believe that additional languages are needed to help increase the usability of our project to those where English is not their main language. For this reason, we have earmarked 5000 Aeon from the Dev fund to help fund this project for community members. We have already reached out to source those available to translate where English is their second language, but if you are able to translate please contact us on Discord or IRC. Please stay tuned for a more formal announcement with details regarding this project.

Aeon WooCommerce Plugin Released

CamtheGeek and 420Coupe have been working on porting over the WooCommerce gateway payment system from Monero for a while now. They have released the software for this for use with Aeon! This can be used on web stores or merchants to accept Aeon directly as payment for your merchandise, products, or services. Feel free to check it out and if you have any issues please contact them via GitHub.

Other Community News

Aeon shout out from CursedMining: update to mining with i7
Aeon Community giveaway #2: Raspberry Pi edition
Monero Fork to CNr successful at block 1788000
Waiting to hear back for listing on 3 exchanges
AFS proposal from Thunderosa: Starting to gain traction with donations!
Aeon close to 12.9 release candidate

From the past two weeks, we now see there may be large changes in store for Aeon in the near future. There is a long road ahead of us but we believe that this may be an opportunity to advance in the cryptospace and be a new project that eyes can look at. Stay tuned for more updates with the State of Aeon!