AELF - Blockchain's True Self

Aelf - Decentralised Cloud Computing Blockchain Network

By CED | Contests Blog | 16 May 2020

Introduction

Blockchain technology will not make it mainstream. With it's slow transactions processing, smart but rigid contracts, through-the-roof maintenance costs and running costs, Several Protocol updates disagreements leading to more harmful and beneficial forks and it's severely fragmented blockosphere, we can almost be certain that as it is, this seemingly very promising technology has set its course towards its waterloo.

Unless! there are some fundamental transformations.

Shelf.co, a fictitious wooden shelves manufacturer and distributor is at the brink of collapse. Just a year ago, it was flushing with over $30million cash flow and $3million profit per year. It all started to dwindle when it decide to integrate the blockchain technology into it's business operations and management including its value chain management and financial processing. As a leading firm in the industry, this surely would be a giant stride to continue being the trail blazer, so it thought.

Indeed, this was a leading step. However, not one in the direction of customer experience. The processing times of transactions dropped leading to delayed order delivery, payments methods now available were inconvenient for the customers as they completely scrapped out the previous methods, since its blockchain solution did not allow it aggregate both, transaction costs skyrocketed. These became even worse when multiple projects came on the Blockchain shelf.co implemented in their business operations especially during Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).

Frustrated, the company adminstration has tagged the entire technology as "good-for-nothing". It's currently on the process of reverting to it's old ways.

Don't get frustrated. Pexels

the blockchain technology is to see the light of day, these layers of difficulties must be peeled off to reveal the core potential of the Blockchain technology, one that is adaptable to the already demanding commercial requirements of Businesses. This is precisely what Aelf Blockchain Network does, open up the the technology to adaption to limitless possibilities.

What is the Aelf Blockchain?

The design of the Aelf Blockchain system or network did not take the optimisation design of other blockchains approach. Rather, it tackles the problems from the roots, yielding a stable blockchain configuration that can be applied and executed to the varying business scenarios. The Aelf Blockchain System can be defined thus;

It is a highly specialised, customisable and efficient chain structure which adapts cloud computing, state snapshots, parallel processing, cross-chain communication and good governance to satisfy the vast variety of Commercial requirements of Businesses.

The Aelf system is designed with already tested and trusted solutions to layout a Minimum Viable Blockchain (MVB) for its community to modify in whatever way that suits them. It aims to be the Linux server OS of the blockchain industry - a blockchain system that lays out the necessary fundamentals for it's Community to build upon.

Aelf Applications.

Of course, there would be no point in having an adaptable blockchain if it doesn't perform better. The limitations of sequential processing, the high maintenance costs as a result of inflated blocks, etcetera are crossed out by its main and side chain architecture capable of processing transactions simultaneously and independently. To deflate any inflation in the system, snapshots of the current states are are taken and detailed transaction data trimmed off.

Consideration is also given to the fragmented nature of the the blockosphere, and Aelf is designed to be a central point that cements it all together through it's cross-chain communication, without any compromise in security even in its point to point communication protocol - sending data to only where is necessary rather than broadcasting it to the entire network.

Speaking of network, the Aelf system provides a governance protocol which allows for future development and integration into the network without any harmful disagreement during updates or forks. In other words it's a growth-centric network or system. A network that lives!

Features of Aelf System.

The Aelf Architecture

Aelf Architecture Overview

The Aelf system is unlike other blockchain systems. It adopts a branched ecosystem tailored for more efficient distribution of labour on the network. Structured like the human nervous system (central & peripheral), the Aelf system utilises both main-chain and side-chains, where the main-chain acts as the central nervous system and coordinates all the side-chains - in-built and generated.

The Aelf main-chain is a blockchain handles the Side-chain dynamic index system, the token system and the DPOS consensus protocol and runs on the Aelf OS.

The side chains communicate i.e share data, with one another via the main chain. The main-chain considers side-chains which runs on the Aelf OS different from ones which do not. As an example, During cross-chain communication, Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains are connected to the main-chain and are treated as "external" side-chains. Internal side-chains are developed from the Aelf OS.

Aelf strongly recommends "one chain one contract type" on its side chains. This is done to properly segregate resources, so that the heavy loading of one business does not affect the running of the other. Cryptokitties wouldn't be able to slow down this Blockchain as it did Ethereum.

In addition, side-chains have the leisure to develop whatever consensus algorithm that suits it, but must communicate to the main-chain via the DPOS consensus algorithm. Although aelf doesn't build side chains itself but leave it open to the community, it provides template for doing so. However there are some system built-in side chains, essential to the network. They include;

Information Registration and Authentication Side Chain
Digital Asset Ownership Side Chain
Asset Initial Distribution Side Chain
Decentralised Exchange Side Chain
Aelf Cross-Chain Optimisation

These side chains handle very pertinent operations on the blockchain such as initial coin sale, information collation, registration and authentication, asset ownership and transfer of ownership, cross-chain communication and it does distinctively, so that the burden of one operation does not affect the other.

The Aelf Operating System (AOS).

Aelf Operating System Interface

The Aelf OS consists of the Aelf kernel and it's shell.
The Aelf kernel is the core of the Aelf network system, holding some foundational essentials required for the Aelf Blockchain to be highly customisable. One of such essentials is the Minimum Viable Blockchain (MVB) system.

The MVB system holds the most fundamental Blockchain components upon which modifications can be made to suit a particular business scenario for the highest efficiency. These components include blocks of transactions, an account system, peer to peer (P2P) communication systems and Consensus protocols.

Designed for speed, the Aelf blockchain infrastructure simultaneously process transactions, if possible, through parallel processing. Transactions, depending on their impact range, are grouped and process simultaneously. As regards its account system, Aelf utilises both Bitcoin and Ethereum Account types to raise its applicability in wide range commercial situations.

The Aelf chain's flexibility stretches down to even it's consensus protocol. Given the smart contract collection defined during the Genesis block which determines the functions, protocol and update mechanism of the chain, the Aelf chain creates the first ever chain that allows for updatable consensus protocol after the Genesis of the chain. Besides being updatable, there can be multiple consensus protocols, businesses defining protocols that's well suited for their business on their side chains.

Data transmission between nodes is still done based on P2P transfer, but on Aelf, not by broadcasting it to the entire network which reduces both security and wastes resources but by Data Tunneling. Because of this method of P2P transfer Aelf can handle more workload.

The "shell" is the interactive interface to the core. It's also referred to as the Aelf system Customer Interface. As if flexibility is the main theme of this project, it again allows for multiple language interaction with it's OS. Although it prefers Docker, it also allows other native programming languages such as Java, C#, Go, JavaScript, LUA.

Defining Smart contracts as protocols, Aelf opens rendering Consensus protocols as a service, Protocol-as-a-Service (PaaS) in addition to cloud based execution of these contracts.

For more details see the technical whitepaper here

The Significance of Aelf.

Cryptokitties, a game where users buy and breed virtual cats revealed Ethereum's Achilles heels. The game developed to aid mainstream adoption of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency became so popular that its transactions slowed down the entire Ethereum network and skyrocketed the chain's transaction fees.

If you don't already see how Provides a sustainable solution to an event like this, permit me to remind you of Aelf's core design principle, "one chain serves one specific business scenario". Via it's side chain generation, modification and segregation, Aelf's infrastructure is positioned to allow businesses run independent of others in a customisable environment. One Dapp's stress on the network does not as little as lag another, let alone affect it's fees.

The Features of Aelf also tackles the hack and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which makes the blockchain incompatible with Businesses. Loopholes in smartcontracts has cost businesses millions of dollars and also lost of Users Data. The use of Side chains is one of the recommended solution to these issues.

Since a side chain is a parallel blockchain which is independent of other side chains, it's hack will leave the other chains unaffected, therefore reducing the valuables hackers cart away with. The branched ecosystem of Aelf has just the design to minimise losses as it holds not only different smart contracts on different chains but also updatable contracts and protocols.

People will not experience the full potential of the blockchain technology if they can only interact and transact on one chain. For businesses this would mean that if they set it up on the Bitcoin or Ethereum network, they can only deal with the Value in those networks. As such, multiple payment channels will require creating several wallets on several blockchain networks as transfer of information and value between networks will be impossible.

The Cross-chain Communication which Aelf brings to the table also again bursts through those limiting boundaries between the business world and the blockchain technology, allowing a business to have multiple payment channels by just setting up the business on a single blockchain network.

Use Case: Aelf & COVID-19

The world's economy is almost at standstill as the pandemic shakes its innermost depths. With the lockdown still tight to the teeth in some countries, governments are looking for ways to sustain their citizens via palliative measures. The US sent over $1000 to her citizens for this reason.

No doubt at all that some citizens wouldn't receive theirs and some, less than they should - this can be blamed on the central points through which such distributions are made.

The blockchain is known as the trust machine, because it eliminates intermediaries and makes such distributions seamless. However a distribution on this level of scale could seriously clog and lag the network's transactions - Just as Initial Coin Offerings do. If other systems relies on the same network, they'd be terribly slowed down. And this is not the time to slow down healthcare systems. As it stands, every minute could save a life.

Enter the Aelf blockchain infrastructure! Not only does it's design segregate resources for these different operations, it's transaction processing is faster than most other blockchain systems. On it, Developers can readily use their native programming language, to build a smart contract and protocol well suited for either distributing palliatives, registering patients or accounting for those vaccinated, that could be immediately executed by the enterprise grade cloud services that the network provides.

Remember, every second determines life or death.

Tokenomics of Aelf.

Aelf is powered to be sustainable by it's virtual economy which has the ELF token as its Main token. Actually, on the Aelf ecosystem there are three types of tokens; the ELF token, resource tokens and tokens created by developers. The ELF token are already listed in major cyptocurrency exchange, including Binance - trading at 716sats at press time.

The ELF token is used to disincentivize bad actors on the platform as well as inventivize the good ones in their different roles including Candidate Node, Production nodes etcetera. They are also used to pay resource fees within the platform and also vote on major Community decisions.

See more details on the Economic Whitepaper here

Shelf.co CEO stumbled upon this blog post about Aelf, considering the pressing issues with his firm, took ample time to study it, visiting the Project's websites and digesting other information from its other channels of information. He came to understand that the pressing needs of his company could not be met by just any Blockchain. The company needed an efficient, specialised, customisable and if need be a private chain without sacrificing an updatable contract or protocol as it's vision was also centred around constant growth in leading the Shelves industry.

To cut the long story short, He decided to give Aelf a try and his firm operated efficiently and flexibly every after.