The State of Aeon 4_7_2019

6 min readApr 7, 2019

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the State of Aeon. We have been moving along the last two weeks making progress on both the community and the core code. The new POW was chosen for the next fork, the translations project is off to a good start, mining and pool infrastructure has been started with pull requests made, and the community has started seeking individuals that can step forward to help with managing and tracking various areas of the project. Let’s dive into what’s been going on.

Kangaroo Twelve Proof of Work (POW)

A lot of research has been done on ASIC resistance and many attempts have been made to lock them out of cryptocurrency networks but they always seem to come crawling back. Stoffu made a proposal to switch to a SHA3 variant for AEON as attempts to brick ASICS had deemed unsuccessful on all CN coins so far. There is always a financial incentive to create an ASIC for a situation where only one task is required. This is one of the main reasons why there is no ASIC resistant POW for cryptocurrencies. If it makes sense, developers will create an ASIC for that task. Not only are they more efficient than other hardware, but the long term stability of the network can be improved by reducing or eliminating the need for a future POW change. There are typically protocol upgrades that are needed for any cryptocurrency project, but eliminating the need to constantly fork to avoid ASICS that will eventually re-appear once there is an incentive to do so does not really make sense. Kangaroo Twelve (K12) is one of the latest variants of Keccak pow. There are plenty of reasons that make this POW an excellent choice for Aeon. Here are some of those positives for using K12:

Aeon will be the FIRST Cryptonote coin to use a SHA3 variant as POW: Hello marketing! This change may also get the eye of developers who may want to contribute to this new change.
Aeon will be able to differentiate its self from Monero: Many community members of Aeon and those outside the Aeon community have always said: “What makes Aeon so different from Monero?”. Not only does Aeon already have many reasons why it is different from Monero technically, this POW change will be a large difference that anyone can see.
K12 is extremely efficient and easy to implement: Being easy to implement allows for maximum market competition between ASIC developers. This means that any manufacturer of an ASIC who believes there is a financial incentive to print a chip for K12 can do so without having to overcome complex hurdles increasing the cost of design and production. Being a market-friendly POW will help adoption on a large scale in the ASIC marketplace.
K12 is secure, fast, and lightweight, just like Aeon has always been: K12 is more secure than sha256 used in Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash pow. Designers of SHA3 had more than 10 years to build off the sha256 pow, creating a lighter, more efficient, and more secure algorithm to replace SHA2 in case it ever failed. Some notes from the K12 technical paper show: “KangarooTwelve can be seen as a new member of the Keccak family. It inherits all the properties of the family such as suitability in hardware and resistance against side-channel attacks, but grew up with a strong focus on software performance and interoperability.”
and
“KangarooTwelve benefits immediately from the new SHA-3 hardware support recently introduced in the ARMv8.2 instruction set”. This shows that this will allow for increased POW performance on mobile devices since most current mobile devices use ARMv8 processors.
CPU/GPU mining will still be available right now: Any hardware can currently mine K12. Switching to this POW will not brick everything but ASICS. Current miners must simply update their miners and configure for maximum efficiency. Stoffu created a test-net and test-net pool for testing and the daemon can be used to check mining.
Many investors will want to invest in a project that is the “first”: Experienced investors typically want to be the first to the pool in order to maximize gains. This is true in any area of the market; housing, technology, IPO’s, new business ideas, etc. If good marketing is done, there could be a gain in value from this.

Translations Project moving forward

Last month we started the translations project for Aeon. In this project, we are sourcing community members to help translate the Aeon main webpage and also the readme & contributing documents for the core code. This project was set forth to help increase the usability for those members whose main language may not be English. This project will be a continuing project as adoption happens, however, we hope to have the main languages translated by the end of 2019. This change will allow users to read Aeon materials in their native language. If you would like to contribute, please contact us in our discord channel or simply make a PR yourself. Spanish and Polish have already been translated thanks to 420coupe and ArkTras and their completed work is a great source for formatting if you have any questions. Thank you for your ongoing support of the Aeon project guys!

Community members unite!

We have been looking for community individuals that would like to dedicate their time to commit to being a resource within the Aeon project. Aeon is starting to move on a path where members of the community can help manage various positions within the project. If you believe you would like to dedicate yourself to and commit to being in one of these roles, please contact us and let us know what you can do. We are looking to fill these positions:

Community Lookout for Merchant and Commerce adoption: We are looking for individuals who can source Merchants and Commerce platforms that could possibly adopt Aeon directly into their platforms. With the recent community integration of a WooCommerce plugin, merchants can now add this to their platforms and accept Aeon directly. Members in this role would be responsible for seeking out merchant adoption, handling questions regarding adoption, and ensuring that merchants are kept up to date on required changes needed for proper operation of any merchant & commerce platform.
Translating Organizer: We are looking for an individual or individuals who are willing to seek out community members to help translate material to other native languages. These members would be responsible for finding individuals to translate, helping them adhere to the translating guidelines, and also make sure PR’s are properly sent and merged.
Mining organizer: We are looking for an individual who can help the adoption of Aeon mining into all available platforms. This includes but is not limited to CPU, GPU, FPGA, an ASIC mining. We want everyone to be able to mine Aeon and help secure the network no matter their hash power. This member will actively seek out the adoption of mining Aeon along with making sure that community members can test any new devices or software if available to do so.

Community meeting for April 2019

We are proposing another community meeting to discuss things going on in the Aeon community and Aeon project. A preliminary date has been set for Wednesday, April 24th, 2019 at 7 PM CST. A follow-up meeting may be planned if members of the community unable to attend the April 24th meeting would like that setup. Please contact us on Discord or IRC if you would like to attend. Meeting agenda will be posted when the meeting time is finalized.

Other notable community happenings:

Aeon is now on Delta Direct app! Thanks camothegeek getting this setup.
Discussion on the Aeon community fund
Unofficial Aeon Full CLI binaries available
FinexBox Exchange listing moved to funding status via private request

Thank you, everyone, who visited today and to all of those who have helped move Aeon forward this year. We are on a track to success and it would not be possible if all the help is given was not there. We hope to see everyone back in two weeks for the next State of Aeon!