Yanislav Malahov, Founder of @aeternityblockchain, joins our AIBC reporter Wesley Ellul at the AIBC Eurasia 2023 Summit.

AIBC: Welcome back here for the aib summit here in Dubai and I am with yanislav form aeternity blockchian. Yanislav, thank you very much for joining us. How is the shouw going so far?
Yanislav: It’s great just got here today was on a panel and it’s interesting people afterwards the weather is sunny and looking forward to the networking this afternoon.
AIBC: Oh you’re going to have a lot of fun. One of the features I find at least at all the aibc events is the networking and the quality, quality of attendees and speakers and sort of just the entire communtity that comes together at this event. Is this your first aibc event?
Yanislav: It’s a second actually.
AIBC: Oh, the second, okay, fantastic. So let’s go to something more important aeternity blockchain. Can you just tell me a little bit about where you guys have been, what you guys have been doing? So our viewers out there can have a good idea about it?
Yanislav: Yeah aeternity blockchain is a new scalable smart contract platform, so me as coming or being like in blockchains space for over 10 years, now actually 11 years. I thought we can do much better than what ethereum was essentially showing or able to do. And I started aeternity blockchain in 2016, 2017 we had a token sale crowdfunding campaign, and it was a very successful or successful enough that we able to develop and launch aeternity blockchain in 2018 november, the mainnet launched, it was completely written from scratch in erlang, which is a language out of the telecom industry, specifically created to make distributed systems in so you can replace codes in hot systems so wireless systems are running while we are having a phone call for example they can do updates on the systems without that the phone call needs to be shut down. So we are using this technology co create the next generation of smart contract platforms. We try to innovate on every single level of what a smart contract platform is made about so the proof of work mechanism, for example, is asic resistance, but we are working also on a new so-called hyperchain consensus mechanism which will enable you to piggyback on the proof of work of a parent chain, for example the bitcoin blockchain to essentially get the best of both worlds of proof of work and proof of stake. With this new hyperchain consensus mechanism which we are working on right now in the foundation, specifically the aeternity crypto foundation working on right now, specifically but coming back to the story, so we lanched aeternity blockchian in 2018 already, with state channels for example we also had a feature very early on, or lots of features very early on which ethereum now also some of them has some of them don’t has, for example native state channels are not really a feature of ethereum. But for example, what we called generalized accouts ethereum has a name EIP something I forgot the precise number but right now it’s a big topic a big hype around, so that you can have essentially smart contracts as accounts and not I’am just private public ke pair essentially or a hash of a public key. Generalized accounts is the way how we called it on the aeternity blockchain if somebody doesn’t believe me please look it up it’s there for several years now. This is something which bothers me personally and sense that we are so innovative we are almost too innovative. Maybe we should slow down with our innovation. That essentially the other people can catch up and really understand what we are doing. Because obviously if you’re just too ahead of the curve, then it’s also as wrong as being too late.
AIBC: I got you, I get you there I mean who would have thought Myspace created social media did really well but then they actually were a little bit too ahead of the curve for true mass adoption to happen and then Fasebook came along and did everything. But you’re in a good place I mean creating new innovative things is very helpful. I think the bigger question is who are you targeting as a possible client bo build upon your blockchain?
Yanislav: So, aeternity blockchain is there’s just one mainnet and one testnet and it’s really we target a diverse set of people, it’s a generalized smart contract platform so like what is the target of a PC almost, everybody can use a PC in a meaningful way or a smartphone hard to say what is the target group of a smartphone. But yes inside let’s say this general very general group of course more let’s say, developers and entrepreneurs so people who can really create the next user applications out of this let’s say base technology a blockchain like with for example intel processors, everybody has heard of a processor everybody has heard of intel almost, nobody knows how a processor looks like fields or what it does, almost nobody is using it here or there or could be also the M1 chip from apple also being um yeah.
AIBC: Do you have any applications which are currently running on the aeternity blockchain? Which would give great examples of how the amazing features that you have on the chain can be used?
Yanislav: There’s one demo application which just got launched a couple weeks ago, of course there are many other applications but this is worth mentioning, this demo application because it’s showing a kind of game where you can win some testnet tokens, and it’s using state channels to essentially have a smart contract in the state channels so this game essentially is written in smart contract, so it’s private but it could be also public optionally public in case you want to essentially prove to the public that something happened you can also publish it, but the main point is that it’s essentially as safe as being on the blockchain. With the speed of light and without transaction fees. So if you don’t have transaction and can do infinite amount of transaction. According to a smart contract and just in case of disagreement settle to the blockchain. You have a huge advantage especially for all the gaming industry, I think it’s super relevant this state channel demo game it’s rock paper scissors state channel demo game if somebody wants to find it. It’s a boilerplate application demo application for developers entrepreneurs to just fork away and create their own for example coin toss game or casino or whatever what other more advanced game you want to come up with.
AIBC: Tell me a bit about the community, the aeternity community, the holders and the governance now you mentioned before that, when we were talking just before the interview that as holders they can actually give their voting rights on to someone else using your blockchain. How does that work?
Yanislav: So this is with hyperchains very important, so hyperchains the new kind of like the next generation of aeternity you can say, um I mean with hyperchains there are proof of stake chains with a proof of work component, so you can say it’s hybrid proof of work proof of stake reusing the proof of wok but underneath it’s rather delegated proof of stake. So the hyperchains is delegated proof of stake where coin holders can delegate their voting power not there coins, so they don’t give the coins away but the voting power which is essentially one to one with their coins to somebody elsewho will then do the vote or the decision for them which their voting power and these delegates they need to do a commitment transaction on the parent chain on I mean I recommend to use the bitcoin blockchain, but of course, it’s kind of like expensive to write to the bitcoin blockchian. So makes also sense to use the cheaper proof of work chain as a parent chain. So this way, yeah, the essentially the delegators or the let’s say the stake pool operators some other projects call them. Also they would need to write to another chain and essentially this way you avoid lots of problems which are coming from let’s have a pure proof of stake blockchian like say the long-range attacks for example.