According to its whitepaper, Aeron aims to be the new standard of aviation safety powered by the blockchain. Maintained by a group of aviation professionals, Aeron wants to reduce air transport-related accidents, which it says currently numbers around 3302 per year. One of the major causes of such accidents is the lack of real experience among pilots, since unsecured flight log data from them is susceptible to fraud and forgery. Also, due to 'pay to fly' experiences, corrupt flight schools, negligence of aircraft operators, the primary data driving any decision is affected. Aeron is built upon a robust and cryptographically secure database that makes it unique compared to other online travel companies, travel search services or internal applications made for flight officials. With this technology, falsification of data can be kept at a minimum. Additionally, as you would expect from a blockchain-backed application, key information is safely stored and is accessible to everyone with 100% transparency. Except that it now comes secured by a multi-sig authentication system that prevents any type of security breach. According to Aeron's Whitepaper, 'The pilot’s application is used by a pilot for personal flight logging. The company application collects and verifies data from aircraft operators, maintenance organizations, flight schools and fixed base operators'. Aeron (ARN) is an ERC20 compliant Ethereum based token, with a fixed supply of 20,000,000 ARN. When the token was launched, a fixed amount of tokens were created and after which no more tokens are to be minted. About 60% of the supply is estimated to be in circulation. The supply should decrease over time when ARN tokens as taken out of circulation. Once Aeron receives ARN tokens in exchange of services, the coins will be again released in to the network. According to its whitepaper, Aeron plans to have a user base of 300000 by the end of 2020. This would encourage it to embed new features on its platform. With the help of multi-app functionality and block technology, the company envisions to have an “airline in the pocket” of sorts within two years. While its price has fluctuated like most other cryptocurrencies, it delivered more than 15x returns within a short period between November 2017 to January 2018. As of July 2018, the price is nearly back to its November levels, at $0.57.
Auroracoin is a decentralised, peer-to-peer, and secure cryptocurrency released as an alternative to the Icelandic Króna to bypass governmental restrictions associated with the national fiat currency. It was launched with the aim of becoming the ‘official’ cryptocurrency of Iceland. AUR was a pioneer in the area of country-specific cryptocurrencies. AUR was launched on the 25th of January, 2014, by an anonymous developer who went by the pseudonym of Baldur Friggjar Óðinsson. It was originally based on Litecoin, using the Scrypt algorithm with a Proof of Work mechanism, but was later updated to use a multi-algorithm architecture in 2016, forked from DigiByte. Auroracoin uses the PoW consensus mechanism, which utilises device hashing power to solve a complex mathematical problem in order to authenticate a transaction proposed to be stored in the blockchain. The difficulty of solving the problem ensures that authenticating forged transactions is very difficult unless the attacker owns an impractically large chunk of the network’s total hashing power. AUR is one of the only cryptocurrencies to use a combination of five different hashing algorithms, namely Grøstl, Qubit, scrypt, SHA-256, and Skein. While initially very popular, Auroracoin has seen little to no activity for a while, with poor marketing, and frequent dev team changes. Reasons for little growth have been various, from slow adoption in Iceland, to developers leaving and joining the project midway. However, it is expected to not go lower than the recent low, and might see a rise as AUR plans to launch a more aggressive marketing campaign in Iceland to promote the coin among the masses. Unlike most other altcoins, Auroracoin has made extensive changes to the original codebase. It has introduced security measures such as Automatic checkpointing, and protecting against known flaws present in the BTC blockchain, such as 51% block replacement attacks.