EXCLUSIVE: Q&A with Matthew Spoke, Founder & CEO of AION Network

CV: I'm here with Matthew Spoke, CEO and founder of AION at EDCON 2018. Why don't you tell me about what AION is planning to accomplish for the rest of 2018.

EDCON 2018 took place in Toronto last week and Cryptovest had a chance to catch up with Matthew Spoke to discuss the future of AION, the roadmap for the rest of 2018, some key challenges, and some advice from Matt.

AION is a multi-layer blockchain network that was designed to solve the primary challenges faced by 1stgeneration blockchains. This includes scalability, privacy, and interoperability. The AION Network has the ability to bridge different blockchains, both private and public. Matthew Spoke, the founder and CEO of AION, has a very impressive background and is a very strong leader with the ability to guide this project to success. Interoperability is a key issue for mass adoption and it’s great to see that Matthew has been working on a solution. With his vast experience from consulting at Deloitte, to being a Fintech advisor for the Ontario Securities Commission, as well as being a current board member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

CV: I'm here with Matthew Spoke, CEO and founder of AION at EDCON 2018. Why don't you tell me about what AION is planning to accomplish for the rest of 2018.

Matthew Spoke: So I guess two general categories, tech and non-tech. On the technical side, we just released our mainnet about two weeks ago. It went extremely well, so now it's a matter of ramping that up, so that's on the mining side. It's a proof of work for hash network, so there's a number of new nodes joining the network on a daily basis. We're working on a couple of partnerships to kind of make sure that there's a good amount of stability on the mainnet. We’re starting to get projects considering AION as where they might host and launch their applications and their businesses, maybe even their ICO's. So that is the mainnet itself.

The next major milestone that's coming is we're building this token bridge that essentially allows us to migrate our AION ARC20 token, which is on the Ethereum network over to the AION native coin. So designing this decentralized bridging protocol for us to be able do that migration. It's kind of a single use case bridge right now, just for the movement of the AION coin, but the goal is to then take that bridge design and broaden it so you can very generically do the movement of any coin or token across those two networks. So that you can essentially, on one side lock up a balance, on the other side create a balance, and make sure that you still maintain that constant supply. It could sit on top of multiple networks, so there's a few gap projects in the Ethereum ecosystem that we're working with on doing a dual implementation of their apps.

CV: Can you name any of them or is it confidential?

Matthew Spoke: Well the one that we've already somewhat been public about is... We have a partnership with Bancorp that... we were in Tel Aviv couple weeks ago doing some tests and demos with Bancorp around what it would look like to relaunch Bancorp on top of AION. Then eventually what it would look like to actually use the bridge so that the Bancorp BNT token could float between the two networks pretty freely. And then we've got a couple of new applications that are just going to be natively launching on top of AION.

So that's just the mainnet itself. Some of them, we're waiting for that bridge functionality to be able to do and we're talking a lot more about what do cross chain applications look like. Applications that are not restricted or constrained to a single network, but applications that could build their token supply and logic on top of multiple networks.

CV: So if an existing ERC20 token moves onto the AION mainnet, is backwards compatibility an issue for them at all?

Matthew Spoke: No. We did a migration demo at AION X this week. So we had our first Developer Conference, and the migration is… I'd say you're in the 95 to 98% compatibility [range]. When you're looking at an existing Solidity based application on Ethereum, there's a couple of characteristics that we've changed. We've done some redesign on how the VM is structured for optimizing performance, and we've changed a couple of things like the data work size, so if you're building an Ethereum app, you'll refer in the Solidity contract to the 256-bit data work size. So there's little switches like that. We have a 128-bit default data work size, but generally, it's a five-minute effort to take an existing app and migrate it. We did a demo of what it looks like to migrate Bancorp.

The other big 2018 technical monster that we're working on is we're designing a completely new VM from scratch... the AION virtual machine. It'll continue to support Solidity as a smart contracting language, but the actual execution engine will be completely redesigned. And the purpose for that is we're building a new smart contracting language that's like a Java family language.

CV: So you're building your own specifically for the AION network?

Matthew Spoke: Yeah. It’s more to capture a lot of the strengths of the Java ecosystem and for a lot of these mainstream engineers that work heavily in the Java ecosystem and there's just some performance and security features of Java that we really like as a language. So we're taking a lot of the design characteristics of the Java virtual machine and using them to design the AION virtual machine. Probably the easiest point of comparison that we'll be able to point to is the idea of parallel transaction processing versus sequential transaction processing for... larger scale. So we've got a dedicated team just working on that design and when we implement that into the network, you'll still be able to run Solidity apps. There will still be that backwards compatibility, but there will also be a new option for running apps in a Java language.

CV: So where do you see AION in the next two years? What do you hope to accomplish?

Matthew Spoke: We set some targets this week at AION X that we made public. I guess, in terms of quantifiable targets, we're targeting AION to be... and this one's a little bit more subjective, it's tough to measure, but AION to be a top-five DApp platform within 12 months, so in terms of places where people will build their applications. There's a lot of outreach and awareness and community growth that we need to do to make that happen. We have a target to make it a top 10 mined network for proof work like GPU networks, so if you look across at Monero, Zcash, Ethereum Classic, and Ethereum. Getting into that top 10 list of cache power that's pointing to the network and then top 10 by market cap, overall, that’s our 12-month targets.

Beyond that, the looser targets just have to do with more physical locations for our teams. More meetups, more face time with developers in the community. We're doing a lot on the corporate partnership side. We're still heavily involved in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. I sit on the board of directors there, and so part of our strategy is also going after the attention of some of these larger corporations as to why AION is a good fit for some of their challenges where they’re still talking about private networks and now increasingly talking about private networks and how they connect to public networks and so interoperability is becoming a big question in the enterprise market; it’s where we want to pitch them on connecting into a public network at some point.

One thing that's probably worth mentioning ... we kind of ... again, we announced this on Wednesday [At Aion X on May 2, 2018]. We're shutting down our