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July 16, 2018, 01:22:23 AM |
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Matthew Spoke, Founder, AION Network
Aion Network: The Third Generation Blockchain
Founder of the Aion Network explains how his organization is working to enable mainstream adoption of blockchain technology at mass scale.
Having spent more five years working exclusively in the blockchain space, Matthew Spoke has committed his professional career to seeing this technology achieve its potential within enterprise markets.
Today, Matthew serves as the Founder of the AION Network, a multi-tier blockchain system designed to address the challenges of earlier generations of the technology to facilitate mainstream adoption. He is also a Board Member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a Fintech Advisor to the Ontario Securities Commission, and a Founding Steward of The Muskoka Group.
Yu Numazaki and I met up with Matthew at the Beyond Blocks summit held in Tokyo in early April and took the opportunity to ask him about the Aion Network.
From left-to-right: Dylan Robertson, Mathew Spoke, Yu Numazaki
How did you get into blockchain?
In 2014 I was working at Deloitte as a chartered accountant. For the fun of it, I wrote a research paper around bitcoin and its implications for the accounting profession. The thesis was claiming that bitcoin could lead to the irrelevance of auditors as a result of it being an entirely transparent financial system.
The paper was well-received, and I got funded to build an R&D team for the next two years. So I started and ran a team at Deloitte until the beginning of 2016. Then I left to start my company, Nuco with a focus on developing enterprise infrastructure.
We were building a private implementation of the Ethereum protocol on how to do private networks and enable private consensus among smaller groups of participants.
We helped launch and found the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. I still serve on the board of directors. The alliance realized that one of the challenges in the enterprise market is that we were building isolated systems in different protocols in different languages.
Some people were building Hyperledger, Ethereum, CUDA, and other solutions. Also there were the public networks getting established. However, nobody was talking about how to connect them and allow for a transition that takes place on one network to be visible to a transition on another network.
What is the Aion Network?
We’re building a new public blockchain protocol that has the characteristics of a decentralized operating system. Our overall objective is to facilitate a relatively liquid flow of proofs, data, and value between chains. Functionality-wise it’s like Ethereum with optimizations for scale and performance.
Sitting around our network is a series of communication systems called bridges that allow us to verify transactions on other networks. These are decentralized pools of nodes that can observe events happening on other chains and then pull them in. So, they could execute logic from events on other chains.
What is the status of this technology adoption among enterprises?
To date, the enterprise market take-up has been slow, mostly because this infrastructure still needs a lot more time to mature. Today’s blockchain systems are nowhere near meeting all the various requirements of enterprise users.
As a result, we decided to step away from all of our customer-facing work, shut down that side of our business, and started focusing on the one layer of infrastructure that’s still lacking. It all came down to performance, scale, and connecting blockchains to each other. So we built a roadmap around that.
Now we’re starting with a focus on public networks where there’s significantly more pickup. This is where we can begin to show valuable evidence of our designs’ merits. Eventually, we see the Aion Network becoming a standard infrastructure that allows private and public networks to communicate with each other across the same protocol.
What is the relationship between Nuco and the Aion Network?
We’re restructuring our operation into a non-profit foundation. This means we’re unwinding our business, the company is getting scrapped, and all resources and operations will move into a foundation. Moving forward, there will be no product, revenue stream, or profit behind the Aion Network.
It will have some similarities to the Linux Foundation’s structure; a non-profit research and development organization. However, it will differ from Linux in that there’s an economic layer on top of these systems. We’ll still make money but in a nontraditional sense. As we prove the merit of our technology, the value of our ecosystem will grow.
We funded the foundation when we launched. We’re now in the process of legally establishing it. We’ve been analyzing different jurisdiction options for the last several months because we want to make sure we account for the implications downstream. We’ve been taking our time to talk to the legal teams at projects that have been active for a few years in different jurisdictions to hear the pros and cons. We’re getting close to a conclusion, but we still have a few jurisdictions on our shortlist that we need to study further.
How is your roadmap progressing?
We’re preparing to re-launch with a different brand and will shift our message away from the crypto market towards the mainstream market. We want to begin educating mainstream people as to why this is relevant to them.
We’ve laid out a roadmap that’s about two years. We’re at our first release right now and are about a month away from our primary net going out. It’s been in public test net since late January. So there has been a couple of months of working with the community on bug fixing and getting stability in the network.
We’re aiming to get version one of the public network published in early May. Following that will be the first bridge that we built between the Aion and Ethereum networks so that we can start moving elements of value and logic between them.
Following that will be a series of other bridges that we’ll build depending on priority; essentially the sizes of the networks that we’re connecting to. And then we’ve got a roadmap for improving the structure and robustness of our blockchain as well as the bridges we’re building between blockchains.
What is the status of your coin?
We’ll be using the proceeds from our ICO to get the next phase of the project started. We’ll have a supply of our own currency in our treasury for the foundation. As we work through those proceeds, the value of our own coin will determine whether or not it’s feasible to continue.
If the project does well, the coin’s value will go up to such an extent that, in theory, we could never run out of money, and so we could continue indefinitely. Conversely, if it goes badly, we’ll run out of money because it’s not getting picked up, nobody is using our system, and so it doesn’t deserve to continue to be funded.
So we’ve tied the future funding of the foundation to the success of our ecosystem, which indirectly gets reflected in the price of our coin.
What is happening in the interoperability space?
Interoperability has been a hot topic since late 2017. There’s so much activity that I can’t seem to go a month without hearing about a new project.
We keep in mind that the end goal should be collaboration for that end purpose, not competing. We launched the blockchain interoperability alliance with ICON and Wanchain so that we could do knowledge sharing and understand each other’s engineering approaches and roadmaps. This way, we can hopefully help each other accelerate. We’ve also met people from Ark and aelf.
We all stand to benefit if we get to the market faster. Rather than reinventing each other’s issues we should focus on learning from each other and then contributing something new.
Furthermore, we don’t categorize ourselves as a project focusing exclusively on interoperability as many projects do. Interoperability is one layer of a fully scalable operating system on a blockchain.
How are you positioned relative to Polkadot and Cosmos?
Cosmos and Polkadot both have solid reputations and long histories in the industry. However, their approach is slightly different to Aion.
Cosmos has been working on their Cosmos hub and what they call “zones,” which carry specific characteristics of the hub. They have a compatibility requirement for their zones to run a similar consensus algorithm to be able to integrate into the hub. If that blockchain is not compatible with the hub, then there’s a layer that needs to get built between the blockchain and the hub. They have something called the peg zone which connects to Ethereum. It has to mimic the Ethereum network but in a compatible way to Cosmos.
There’re also the early use cases that are focusing on coins getting locked and re-minted on different sides. So lots of interesting use cases for that, for why you’d want to lock a coin on one side and re-mint it on the other for ease of trade. But it’s quite focused on the crypto asset market.
Polkadot is a little more generic and aligned with us concerning architecture. They’re working on something called the Relay Chain and Parachains. Similar to Cosmos they have a requirement of how these parachains would be compatible with their Relay. Their bridge design is impressive, and we’ve learned a lot from looking at it.
One of the areas that we’ve differed in our philosophy is that if you’re a Parachain inside the Polkadot ecosystem, then you have to adopt specific security parameters dictated by the Relay, which becomes the arbiter of how security gets governed on different networks inside that ecosystem.
In contrast, at Aion, we’re trying to make sure that there’s little to no requirement on the chain we’re connecting to. In this way, the chain doesn’t have to adjust, fork, or update its protocol to become compatible with ours. That’s the first difference.
The second difference is on top of our equivalent of a Relay, we’re building a fully operating virtual machine ecosystem on that relay. This means we can run DApps (decentralized applications) from that hub and those DApps can start to pull bits and pieces of logic from other networks that are connected to it. So, rather than just being a router of messages, it’s also the place where you can build an application.
We don’t look at anybody as a competitor because our real opportunity is taking this to the rest of the world. There’s tons of space for all of us to push forward with our individual hypothesis on how we should build these systems. And we’re making open-source systems. We’re all learning from each other as we go and there’s a high degree of mutual respect.
What’s the number one challenge you’re facing?
Our biggest challenge is trying to grow the awareness in general. There’s a lot of people that we have to reach for the first time. We’ve done a reasonable job at getting the people who follow us actively to understand what we’re trying to accomplish. One thing in this market that we want to clarify is how we’re building our organization away from a for-profit corporate structure.
We realized that there are different motivations for shareholders and coin-holders. If you have a corporate structure that includes shareholders and a coin that includes coin-holders, then you’ll probably run into conflicts where you have to benefit one to the detriment of the other.
That is a conflict we don’t want to face. It’s going to become a significant governance issue in this market in the next few years where shareholders of companies will have certain motivations, and the coin-holders will have others.
Unfortunately, coin-holders don’t come with voting rights and shareholders do, and you may find coin-holders getting screwed over in restructurings, acquisitions, and bankruptcy proceedings as this market mature. We wanted to clean that up by making sure we only had a single group of stakeholders; the people who follow our project, actively use our technology and hold our coin.
That’s probably one thing that we’re trying to better articulate. This is not a company. We’re not selling services or products. This is a collaborative community initiative that we hope will get as much adoption as possible.
If all goes well, how will things look ten years from now?
A decade from now average people that use this technology will probably not understand the protocols that underpin it nor will they need to. There will be a whole bunch of protocols that interact with each other in a straightforward, elegant, and seamless way.
The types of applications and user experiences we can unlock on top of that are simple, obvious, and not complicated for consumers. We won’t be talking about interchain communication, wallets, and exchanges the same way we do today. It will have been obfuscated to the end user, and hopefully, Aion is a core part of that final design.
Where should technologists go if they want to get started with the Aion Network today?
Our GitHub is the best place to see what we’re building and read the documentation we’ve published. We have a forum where you can interact with our engineering team.
Also, our website has our whitepaper, and we’ve got a blog where we publish updates on what we’re working on.
We’re planning to put out structures whereby people can get involved in research, and we’ll have grant program and bounty programs so that contributors can earn some money by supporting us. There’ll be more coming on that in the next few months.
Why did you decide to visit Japan?
Meeting with Japanese supporters of the Aion Network project.
We’re doing a pretty significant global tour this year, focused on developer adoption, having people build stuff on top of the Aion protocol, and general market awareness.
We’ve been going to developer meetups, getting communities testing ideas on top of the Aion protocol, building apps, and business involved in the blockchain. In particular, we want Aion to be used in a widely known project.
There’s a lot of activity going in Japan. There are some exciting businesses building blockchain-based applications here. We’re hoping to find a Japanese project to work with to demonstrate some of the characteristics of what we’ve built.
Hopefully, we can give people the right reasons for following the project. In Japan, that means spending time educating people about our differentiating factors.
It’s easy to get labeled as just another crypto. So we’re trying to make sure that our message is focused on the uniqueness of our design and the sophistication of our software. Then, hopefully, people see value in that and want to get involved somehow.
What has been the general consensus among people who invested in your ICO?
We haven’t heard anything negative about people’s experiences on that front. Generally, people have been pretty happy supporting the project so far. We designed our economic structure somewhat uniquely when we launched it that has been advantageous to people as we develop more, as they contribute more.
We get a little criticism for not having emphasized exchange listings and wallet integrations. We don’t have anybody on the team whose job it is to focus on the financial market side. To date, we’ve just let it happen organically, and we intend to continue doing so.
Unfortunately, this means that we’re not doing things as quickly as some people would like. However, from our priorities, it’s happening as it should because the team is focused on development. The engineering team is focused on building, and the community team is focused on engaging with developers. That means we don’t spend anywhere near as much time as some other projects talking about the value of our coin or the markets we’re listed on. We stay away from that.
What direction will your career take long-term?
I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with some of the world’s foremost leaders in the blockchain field, and look forward to playing a part in the continued development of this technology in the decades to come.
To learn more about the Aion Network, please visit their website, GitHub, Twitter, or YouTube channel.
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