Okay, so what is AION?

The following paragraph is straight from AION's EXECUTIVE SUMMARY by Matthew Spoke, CEO

Today, there are hundreds of blockchains. In the coming years, those hundreds will become thousands and—with ,widespread adoption by mainstream business and government—millions. Blockchains don’t talk to each other at all ,right now; they are like the PCs of the 1980s.

In the future, blockchains will federate data and value in a hub and spoke model similar to the internet. The future of ,mainstream blockchain adoption will be achieved by the development of a networked, federated blockchain to integrate ,these separate spokes. That integrated blockchain network is Aion.

AION is a third-generation blockchain network that will enable any private or public sector organization to:

Federate: Send data and value between any Aion-compliant blockchain and Ethereum.
Scale: Provide fast transaction processing and increased data capacity to all Aion blockchains
Spoke: Allow the creation of customized public or private blockchains that maintain interoperability with ,other blockchains, but allow publishers to choose governance, consensus mechanisms, issuance, and participation.

At the root of the Aion network is a purpose-built, public, third-generation blockchain called Aion-1. Designed to connect ,other blockchains and manage its own robust applications, Aion-1 also provides the economic system that incentivizes interoperability in the ecosystem.

AION tokens are the fuel used to create new blockchains, monetize inter-chain bridges, and secure the overall network

Who is Matt Spoke and how did AION come to be?

Matt Spoke spent 5+ years and lead a team at Deloitte in Toronto, Ontario as a Charter Accountant and then positioned himself into a Blockchain Specialist after gaining interest in the space, he bought some Bitcoin in 2012 and in 2014 wrote a paper and proposal that made it's way up to the CEO of Deloitte on the premise of why bitcoin will make auditors irrelevant. It created an R&D team because of it and this was pre-Ethereum.

Matt led that team for 2 years and continued to do enterprise work for Deloitte seeing a gap in market of scalability, interoperability, and performance for enterprise solutions.
Matt left Deloitte to launch Nuco and has been successful there since May of 2016. Matt's work also helped lead to the foundation of the EEA(Enterprise Ethereum Alliance) where Matt sits on the board of directors.

Relationship between Nuco and AION, Nuco is the company, AION is the project and research, will move to a non profit organization. So that the the AION protocol has a life of it's own with or without the success of our Nuco.

What's the problems AION is trying to solve?

1. Communication Across Blockchains
"One problem is the need to communicate across blockchains (read executive summary above) The AION team had the realization that there are a new set of problems and fragmentation in the space so their solution is AION."

They have been observing the signals of demand in the blockchain space and are trying to be ahead of the curve for what the requirements are going to be needed in the next few years.

2. A New Public Blockchain that can achieve mainstream scaling requirements

With AION the design and Intent is for a scalable, decentralized network of many blockchains, and the keyword is scalalbe!!
They intend to build a new public blockchain that it in of itself is also scalalbe.

Who are also working on this problem?
Cosmos (Internet of Blockchains)
Pokadot (Decentralized home for diverse chains)
and
AION - but AION will also be much more, a full fledged smart contract blockchain platform, not just a bridge between new and existing blockchains.

The core is a new public blockchain that can achieve the scaling requirements of a mainstream (millions of users) on a frequent basis. So think EOS or Plasma for Ethereum, solving interoporability, scalability on a single blockchain.

3. Proof of Intelligence

Another layer is Proof of Intelligence (page 18) - this is to be an interesting function to call AI computation on chain in blockchain apps, This is a part of AION's 5 year vision.

It's a "broad vision that covers no only bridging between existing blockchains but also the ability to scale more apps on a single blockchain." ~Matt Spoke

AION's Team

There are 24 team member profiles on their team page, here are a few key players:

Jinius Tu is the CTO for Nuco, he worked as Blockchain Arhitect & Lead Developer on Deloitte's Rubix team with Matt Spoke. (so they have worked successfully together before) His previous experience includes 2 years as Senior Risk Engineer at Morgan Stanley and a little over 1 year as Chief Architect and Senior Developer for a multi-exchange bitcoin trading system, including Coinbase, BTC-e, BTC China, Okcoin, etc.

Their COO is Kesem Frank whom also worked on the Rubix team with Matt and Jinius, another plus for working together. Also, he is the co-founder at Nuco.

Jason Burke is their CFO and who also seems to hold CFO positions at a couple of small companies while also serving as a C-Level Advisor in Positive Venture Group Inc. in which he is a founder.

You'll find AION's Business Development point person Dipesh Pradhan in their Discord updating and interacting with the community. His background in banking with Wells Fargo as Senior Qa Analyst and Specialist appears to be a solid foundation for both in the trenches work on automated systems leading teams on projects to point of contact for larger teams across the globe.

Others in their team seem well rounded, covering both front and back end engineers/developers whom have also worked at Nuco together, some for 3-6 months, others for 1 year or longer. They have 3 Business developers that span a good range of experience with Duncan Cameron, Karim Zeine, & Dipesh. The flesh out the team members in operations, product management, and now 2 full time in marketing (where they state they needed to focus on more below) who have only been there a couple months now, Richa Vajpeyi is Head of Marketing and Benn Godenzi acting is Director of Marketing, who interestingly enough is also playing and avisory role at Skrill ;)

AION's Advisors

The Vitalik Effect... it's worth noting that Matt Spoke mentions in an interview (sourced below) that he maintains a friendship with Vitalik and is still active in his role on the Board of Directors for the The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. However, Vitalik Buterin is listed as an Advisor for Nuco, but not on the AION project.

Anthony Di Lorio, (who isn't this guy involved with now days ;) The Co-founder of Jaxx, CEO and Founder at Decentral (a innovation hub in Toronto that focuses on disruptive and decentralized tech) Another interesting note is that he held an 8 month long position as Chief Digital Officer at the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Eric Gu is the founder of Metavers Foundation at Metaverse who has previously spent almost 4 years as Co-Founder of ViewFin, a Chinese market leader in blockchain technology and the company that developed Metaverse.

Jeff Pulver is an American Internet entrepreneur known for his work as founder and chief executive of pulver.com and co-founder of Free World Dialup, Vonage, MoNage and Zula (app). Pulver has been called a Voice over Internet Protocol pioneer, and has written extensively on VoIP telephony, and the need to develop an alternative to government regulation of its applications layer.

There are others, advisors run the gambit of angel investors to entrepreneurs to others in the blockchain space, seems like a pretty decent list.

Where are they with the AION project now?

The first iterations go back to Deloitte and they have carried over that intellectual property and code that was built in late 2014 over to the AION project. It focused on how to build more scalable pieces of a private network, but Matt realized that a lot of these architectural pieces are becoming relevant again. Example being, how to make the virtual machine process larger numbers of transactions on a per second basis, reusing some components already established have given AION a solid start solving these issues.

The bridging technology is much more recent and goes back to March of this year, but AION's first release will be coming in early 2018. They plan to have a functional test net with first phase milestones, and potentially more and an actual live environment that people can mine and participate in.

Hype and Latest Updates?

AION has remained fairly low-key, and realize they are not a marketing team, they state they are first and foremost a very tech and engineering team, but has had to learn about marketing as it hasn't been their forte, to go out to market and hype the project.

But their communities are continuing to grow, boasting over 5,000 members in their Telegram!!

Latest updates have been accepted well by the community, Matt's been on tour promoting to raise capital for the project, looking heavily to develop more relationships with both existing and new block chain protocols that may have a requirement for bridging and interoperability, these are functions AION is building.

November 22th, 2017 - SONM to provide mining power to Aion - Aion’s CTO Jin Tu’s added, “Partnering with SONM in the first release of Aion will enable the community to rapidly deploy the Aion kernel and enhance the overall security of the network. I am also excited to collaborate with them on our on-going research and development with the proof-of-intelligence algorithm.”

SOMN is the universal fog supercomputer powered by the Ethereum blockchain.

November 8th, 2017 - Aion and Metaverse partner on cross-chain digital assets and oracles.

November 2nd, 2017 - Caribbean's mobile money platform BITT welcomes AION “We are excited to have Aion as part of the blockchain hub in Barbados and look forward to exploring a partnership with them to achieve Bitt’s Settlement Network and financial inclusion goals using the Bitt payment ecosystem.” Oliver Gale, Co-Founder Bitt

October 19th, 2017 - They announced a relationship with Bancor, and in the process of putting together a list of partners of high values blockchain protocols that AION thinks will be the first to adopt their protocol of connecting between networks in the next few weeks.

AION is also working on the enterprise side, with issues solving "what does it mean to go beyond a single private network?" moving forward based on lots of proof of concept work performed in 2014.

Of note is the Toronto Stock Exchange as a client because digital assets are on the horizon and how to be ready to implement them.

Admittedly Matt mentions that "AION's an exciting design and concept, but in and of itself it's complicated and is going to take time and effort, engineering and research to actual implement. He states it's funny to watch online community discussions expecting day to day turnarounds in milestones, but this is mulit-year milestones."

AION has been very transparent about the road map and their expectations.

Token Sales, Mechanics, and the TRS

AION raised over $7Million USD during their pre-sale (their goal was $15M) and last month modified the terms of their public token sale after following other market examples such as Tezos and Pokadot. Originally, I think the total hard cap of $100 Million was off putting to early investors, and may have contributed in struggling to meet their $15M Pre Sale Cap. They adjusted this though, taking the total hard cap down to $60 Million making it even more attractive to opt-in to their TRS as the minimum bonus rose from 175% to 278%.

November 24th, 2017 - Big news today (released at the time of writing this article) AION has decided to cancel their 2 phases of public token sale! Wow. At a time when companies are raising far too much, these two updates show us that Aion is trying to be responsible with the money raised in the pre-sale and Matt even mentions they're "confident with the amount of capital that we have now to get our milestones started", instead focusing on getting their first milestone built and released."

The Token Release Schedule Bonus has now been increased from 278% to 292.73%

So why participate in the TRS?

"Giving people an opt-in option to lock your tokens in with benefit and watch us grow and develop, and this is where the real value of the project will come. The community can tie some patients into this timeline, kind of a partner with the AION foundation, a community of long term commitment vs day traders. It's not a year long lock up, but will release monthly over time." ~Matt Spoke

So due to the decision to cancel the public sale, the only way you can invested in AION and their TRS right now is to purchase AION tokens on EtherDelta and then contribute here ~> https://aion.network/trs.html

Note: Contribution to the TRS will end on December 8th, 2017 at 1400 UTC

December 15th at 1400 UTC, the TRS will kick-off with the initial release of tokens to TRS participants. (31.25% (25% Init + 6.25% Monthly) followed by 11 more months @ 6.25%

To learn more about the TRS and this change check out this blog post and the November 24th's Token Sale Update

What's next?

The very latest is the AION team is focusing on their early milestones, some of which are to transfer ERC20 to AION bridge, how to move an AION token out of the ERC20 contract and turn it into an AION coin on the new AION blockchain in a decentralized way w/o an exchange process.

More technically from their whitepaper's 1rst milestone "Aion Phase 1" is the interchain communication and bridging infrastructure, including modified, high-performance EVM, functioning bridging and interchain communication, and modified proof-of-work consensus algorithm.

Very recently (via their Twitter feed) Matthew Spoke on the panel at the Tokyo Blockchain and Cryptocurrency conference, was interviewed on Korean TV discussing blockchain and interoperability, spoke on Jinse in China, and was on a panel at Blockchain10x in Toronto discussing the whats and whys of ICOs.

Matt Spoke and the Aion team recently went down to Cancun where Matt gave a keynote speech at Devcon Three (the 4th Annual Ethereum Developers Conference) on Friday, Day 3, Matt went over what AION is, how it works, etc.

You can watch Aion's presentation at Devcon 3 here.

The Aion team at Devcon hosting the Unicorn Party and Pitches #devcon3 #ethereum #aionnetwork #eth #AION pic.twitter.com/mT2zFg6Owd

— Aion Network (@Aion_Network) November 2, 2017

MrYukon mentions in his interview that he doesn't see AION as a competitor with someone like Ethereum platform, more of a co-existence at the technical level, blockchain to blockchain, and Matt states AION owes their early design to some of the research from the Ethereum community/foundation, maintains a good friendship with Vitalik and the team, help found the EEA and Matt is still very active there. Are interested in a lot of other projects, met with founders of Tezos last week. We can all learn from each other.

"Industry is so young, almost fragile, does more good to get along and help each other out, benefit from work and collaboration."

IMO Matt's activity is shows us his dedication to AION through his busy schedule and personal updates. He and the team are have been and continue to be very open and transparent with the community.

At the very least if you are keen on AION after reading this article, despite the public sale cancellation (so far it's being well accepted), I'd urge you to get involved via AION's social channels:
Telegram | Discord | GitHub | Facebook | Twitter | Youtube | LinkedIn | Medium

(personally, I'm excited to be a part of their community and look forward to following their development.)

Sources and Links

Note: Some content used in this article was sourced from MrYukonC's:
Aion - Interview with Founder and CEO Matt Spoke

AION.network
https://aion.network/
AION's Whitepapers
https://aion.network/whitepapers.html
MrYukonC's Twitter
https://twitter.com/MrYukonC