Aurora: The Smart Contract Blockchain Platform Offering Solutions
Aurora is a smart contract blockchain platform with an implementation of the Aurora chain and its Aurora token (AOA). Both of them were presented in may 2018 as the answers to the challenges relating to speed, security and scaling.
Developed with the goal to ‘’paint’’ the blockchain industry in the colors of the polar lights, the Aurora platform addresses the colorful spectrum of industries that it aims to improve with its solution. Aurora aims to improve the video gaming industry, AI, Big Data, and the internet of things.
Regarding the video gaming industry, Aurora hopes to integrate in-game currencies and game data with its blockchain. Everything will be tokenized including the game props and equipment with the tokens made tradable as well. Aurora also aims to improve the artificial intelligence industry by linking data security and synergy by moving away from the concept of centralized networks that have an issue with enabling streamlined communication between the nodes.
When it comes to the Internet of Things, Aurora’s blockchain will become a foundation of the future decentralized IoT systems which will profit from transactions and collaboration among the connected devices. The improved data management and security by Aurora will provide a bridge link between the IoT and Big Data as to major technologies.
Key Blockchain Issues
The goal of Aurora is to link all of the above sectors with an encompassing blockchain that is powered by a smart contract platform which will allow for the development of the new class of decentralized applications. At the same time, the existing blockchains are seen as plagued by the issues that the platform plans to resolve.
Aurora sees blockchain as a platform for cross-sectoral cooperation among diverse industries. This will be achieved by allowing the companies to integrate their own applications and rules into the blockchain and use them to establish key links with businesses in other industries. The platform will develop smart contracts with robust underlying support and tools in order to make them useful for diverse industries. The public chain is seen as the major source of support in an effort to make smart contracts faster to execute. Also, Aurora plans to speed up the processing time of transactions by merging the existing technologies with the new ones.
Aurora wants to offer blockchain architecture which is fully upgradeable and aims to automate the entire process in the long run. This will be achieved with the help of technologies such as the automated upgrade of block heights and the implementation will make the ecosystem development much faster but will also bring down the cost of data storage capacities.
Combo Offered by Aurora
Having identified the issues before the project was launched; the team deployed multiple solutions which include both known technologies as well as other ones. Some of them include the Delegated proof of Stake consensus mechanism, Byzantine Fault tolerance, P2P Stereo-net, intelligent application isolation, smart contract development platform, multi-asset offering, multi-chain parallel operation and cluster grouping.
“Representative Democracy”
The delegated proof-of-stake mechanism is implemented on the Aurora platform as a technology which is supposed to deliver the governance model resembling the one of a representative democracy. DPoS allows everyone who holds the Aurora tokens to use their balance as a stake in voting for delegates. The stake is what determines the symbolic weight of one’s vote which means that those who invest more in the system will have more to say in the matters related to the chain. The delegates who do not own huge stakes can compete with each other if they want to collect votes and get into the process. This is supposed to promote decentralization in addition to enforcing ‘’digital democracy.’’
With aurora, the system features a threshold by which the account can apply for the candidacy of an AOA proxy and the required balance is set at more than 5 million AOA tokens. The voting rights for proxy candidacy are extended to everyone who holds enough balance of the AOA token. When a proxy candidate’s balance goes below the required amount, the candidacy is rejected. In the meantime, the highest ranking 101 candidates that have secured the most votes will be designated as proxy nodes in charge of managing transactions. In order to ensure a democratic outcome, each address can vote for each candidate provided that the maximum quota of 101 votes has been reached.
Higher Speed and Better Security
The implementation of the DPoS system on the Aurora is seen as the perfect tool which is supposed to bring about both higher individual transactions speeds and an increased number of processed transactions per second. The TPS value is now at 2000 with the commission amounting to 0.0001 AOA.
There is also the promise of higher security without the issues that the Proof-of-Work and standard proof-of-stake models are facing these days. This model also wants to become suitable for running numerous applications with high levels of scalability which is in correlation with the goal of the asset to establish itself as a platform for easy development of further applications. In addition, the developers of the project decided to combine their DPOS mechanism with the Byzantine Fault Tolerance system in order to upgrade the scalability of the platform but to also reduce the risks of unwanted forks which can take place with these kinds of mechanisms.
Additional Benefits of the DPoS
The aurora team combined the DPoS with BFT and this is supposed to bring more benefits such as equitable reward distribution. In theory, the users will become more incentivized to elect the delegates who offer the best rewards by spreading the reward benefits evenly.
It will also become easier to detect malicious activities because the voters can identify nefarious actions in real-time and can use their votes to remove the undesirable delegates from the system. In the same time, the delegates will become aware of the potential to be voted out and lose their funds and reputation in the process.
The use of this algorithm is associated with less energy consumption and compared to the PoW there is no need for harsh competition for the addition of new blocks.
Summary
The AOA tokens have a total supply of 10 billion units and 6 billion of them are in circulation since 2018. The supported wallets for this token come in two different options- AOA mainnet wallets for developers and used as a visual interface for managing accounts and the AOA Lite wallet which works as a personalized mobile wallet for users and funds transfers as well. The token’s market cap reached 111USD million and the token is available for trade on crypto exchanges such as KuCoin, CoinEgg and others.
The aurora mainnet was launched in September 2018 as a part of the group effort of the Aurora tem headed by the CEO Aqua Zhao and Bo Zhang.
