Aeternity is a brand new blockcoin that provides quick and safe smart contracts that interface with real world data by way of a decentralized oracle. It achieves scalability through Turing-complete state channels, this is one way in which it differs from Ethereum. Through a major innovation in oracle design, the interface to data in the real world is based on prediction markets. Scalability is increased by the state channels because all of the transactions are independent, this allows them to be processed in parallel. In addition, contracts will never write to a shared state, keeping the testing and verification simplified.
Aeternity is powered be an Aeternity token, which can be symbolized as either AE or Aeon. Resources that one may consume on the platform are paid for with these Aeternity tokens, they are also used as the bases for any implemented applications on said platform. A small contract that is hosted on Ethereum will determine the distribution of Aeternity tokens in the genesis block. An account that will support human friendly names as well as have an address and balance will manage the Aeternity tokens.
There are three identities in Aeternity, they are pubkey, hash, and a name. The pubkey comes from the account, the name is from the alias, and the hash links to any further data on the IFPS.
The blockchain itself is made up eight components, they are as follows:
1 The hash of the previous block
2 A Merkle Tree of Transactions
3 A Merkle Tree of accounts
4 A Merkle tree of names
5 A Merkle tree of channels
6 A Merkle tree of oracles that have not answered the questions asked of them
7 A Merkle tree of oracle answers
8 A Merkle tree of Merkle roots, these are used to prove identity and to prove the existence of the blockchain.
This blockchain is of course revolutionary in the way that it functions. It is a hybrid of a Proof-of-Work and a Proof-of-Stake blockchain. It achieves its consensus through POW mining. And uses a "Cuckoo Cycle" algorithm by Tromp. These blockchains are even able to be mined with smart phones, allowing it to achieve the highest possible level of decentralization. Governance is achieved by way of PoS prediction markets. These Prediction markets have been shown to be very good tools to extract information from crowds of people, it has even been shown to be better than basic voting.
Aeternity boasts an infinite trustless off-chain transaction speed that is limited only by the speed of light since the transactions are taking place in state channels. The on chain transaction speed is defined by four variables. "B" which is the block size measured in bytes. "F" which is the blocks till finality. "R" which is the time till finality measured in seconds, and "T" which is the transaction size measured in bytes. It should be noted that these variables are always being updated by either the consensus or the governance.
Aeternity utilizes a Turing-complete virtual machine that processes smart contracts through MAST. Aeternity turns these smart contracts into financial agreements that distribute money according to rules that are predetermined.
Resources:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1819473.0
http://www.aeternity.com