The AELF ECOSYSTEM #AelfExplained

By Tejas19 | Crypto_ed | 5 May 2020

WHAT IS BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY?

Blockchain technology is a wonderful technology that was used in the functioning of the bitcoin and now it has various other use cases. It can be used for building smart contracts, voting applications, transfer of resources and many more. All the transactions are stored in blocks which are chained to one another through cryptographic means. The transactions are available on every participant's computer running the software. It is basically a distributed ledger technology where all of them store the transaction data on their computers and it keeps updating often. It defines a trustless way to get things done P2P without any third party interfering with the process. The data stored on the blockchain are transparent, public, immutable, decentralized and faster transactions. Now the problem with a single blockchain is it can handle only a certain amount of transactions in a given period of time as the block size is small and the load on the chain is too high.

WHAT IS AELF AND WHAT IS THEIR MISSION?

Aelf is a decentralized cloud computing blockchain network that can be utilized by enterprises for delivering high performance. So they're a BaaS (blockchain as a service) enterprise that provides all the necessary infrastructure on which other companies could make use of the platform to deploy smart contracts/dapps or as the aelf foundation call it they're the operating system (Linux) which would soon be installed by others. A single blockchain can handle only a certain amount of load and to overcome this burden aelf has come up with a solution by introducing Multi-chain parallel processing systems. The main chain has various side chains and each side chain has many other side chains which can each carry out different tasks independently and can communicate with one another. This enables high end performance, effective usage of computer resources, improved scalability and high transactions per sec. Hence aelf will solve the biggest problems in the blockchain space which is Scalability, lack of segregation of resources and working governance model.

THE PEOPLE BEHIND AELF

Haobo Ma - Founder of ælf, founder/ CEO of Hoopox; Blockchain expert, early adopter of digital assets; Ex-CTO of GemPay, AllCoin; A member of Blockchain Experts’ Commission of Chinese Institute of Electronics.

Zhuling Chen - MIT graduate; Ex- Senior Consultant at Roland Berger; advised multiple MNCs (Medtronic, Infineon Technologies) and governments.

Yalong Yang - Post Doctoral at Harvard University, PhD from Monash university with specialization in visualising geo-spatial and transaction network data

Jason King - Co-creator of FLASH. Currently the CEO at CGS.

With such brilliant, intelligent and experienced people behind the aelf foundation the future of the project looks good and I believe are in safe hands.

HOW DO USERS COME TO A CONSENSUS?

The AELF ecosystem uses the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus which is a fast, decentralized and efficient manner to attain consensus in the blockchain network. The stakeholders get one vote each for a witness and they can vote as many different witnesses as they want as long as they feel efficient decentralization is maintained. Now the witness with the most number of votes will get to add transactions onto the block and put the block on to the blockchain. Witnesses are rewarded by verifying the transactions on the blockchain. If the witnesses are able to perform the given task successfully then they gain a good reputation among the stakeholders and can be selected again to add blocks. They keep rotating and give chance to other witnesses to perform the mining operations so that effective decentralization is maintained. On the failure of performing the task, the stakeholder has the right to remove the witness from being involved in the process the next time. Just like how the witness is selected by the stakeholder the same way a delegate is selected. The job of the delegate is to maintain the network and can also propose changes in the miner reward fees, transaction fees and block size. This consensus mechanism is already being used by Cardano (ADA), Tezos (XTZ) and EOS.

AELF TOKENOMICS

The tokens that run on the Ethereum Blockchain are classified as ERC-20 tokens and AELF (ELF) also falls under this category. The token is used as fees when deploying the smart contracts, transaction fees for transferring from one wallet to another, it is also used in voting for important decisions in the AELF chain like selecting the miner nodes.

Image Source: Taken from their website aelf.io

There are three type of tokens in the aelf ecosystem

ELF Token: This is the main token as mentioned above which is used in transaction fees, voting and rewards. The total issuance is 1 billion and the supply is fixed. So for each transaction in the blockchain a transaction fee has to be paid out of which 10% is burned and the remaining 90% will enter the rewards pool.

Resource Token: The Resource token comprises of CPU, RAM, DISK, NET, READ, WRITE, STORAGE, and TRAFFIC resources respectively. So for example a certain smart contract or dapp is being deployed on the aelf blockchain some amount of storage space, RAM, CPU, DISK and all the above mentioned tokens would be required so the developers should make sure they have enough amount of the resource token to run the smart contract or dapp. The resource token can be purchased with the ELF tokens. The number of resource tokens is 500 million which is also fixed. 0.5% fee is charged for purchasing resource tokens so 50% is destroyed and 50% goes to the rewards pool.

Developer created Tokens: Developers also get the right to create their own token with the incentive mechanism of their choice.

The block rewards are set at 0.125 ELF. Just like in bitcoin the aelf ecosystem also have introduced a 4-year cycle after which the reward is halved. The reward 0.125 ELF might seem very small but the fact that they produce 8 blocks in 4 secs the rewards would compound each minute. From the rewards pool the ELF tokens are split among various participants in the aelf ecosystem which include the stakeholders, delegates, witness.

ELF is currently trading at 0.07$. It has lost 55.95% of its value this year but with the Stage 1 of the mainnet already done the release of the mainnet in Stage 3 is ever so close by it is a bargain now. The fundamentals are strong and if it gains good traction it would be really valuable in the future. The road map of the mainnet launch can be found here in this blog.

PARTNERSHIPS

With Aelf already partnered with the big players in the industry Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The future looks bright and many more collaborations would be expected in the near future.

WHERE TO BUY AND STORE AELF?

ELF can be bought in almost all the famous exchanges including Binance, Bitfinex, Huobi, OKEX, KyberNetwork and many more. The complete list can be found below as given in their website. The official web wallet, android wallet and IOS wallet are in the beta version.

Image Source: Taken from their website aelf.io

CONCLUSION

The aelf ecosystem is lead by a very talented team. The fundamentals are strong and if successful they would be solving a huge problem in the blockchain ecosystem. The aelf blockchain provides all the necessary infrastructure and can be easily implemented by other companies. With great partnerships and with many more collaborations yet to come, the future looks bright and aelf is here to stay!