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.
ChainLink is a decentralized oracle service, the first of its kind. When Ethereum went live in 2015, it revolutionized what blockchain could bring to enterprise solution and traditional business. Blockchain was no longer just a medium for new age financial transaction, confined to Bitcoin’s potential to disrupt traditional currency exchange. With Ethereum powered smart contracts, Vitalik Buterin opened up a Pandora’s Box of use cases for blockchain technology. Problem is, per their design, smart contracts can only manage data on the blockchain. Their potential, the ability to provide tamperproof, decentralized applications for uses the world over, is still largely untapped, as many of the smart contract programs built on Ethereum lack a bridge to the real world industries they’re trying to improve. ChainLink’s first component consists of on-chain contracts deployed on Ethereum’s blockchain. These oracle contracts process the data requests of users looking to take advantage of the network’s oracle services. If a user or entity wants access to off-chain data, they submit a user contract (or requesting contract) to ChainLink’s network, and the blockchain processes these requests into their own contracts. These contracts are responsible for matching the requesting contract up with the appropriate oracles. The contracts include a reputation contract, an order-matching contract, and an aggregating contract. The first of these, the reputation contract, is exactly as it sounds: it checks an oracle provider’s track record to verify its integrity. In turn, the order-matching contract logs the user contract’s service level agreement on the network and collects bids from responsible oracle providers. Finally, the aggregating contract accumulates the collective data of the chosen oracles and balances them to find the most accurate result. Unfortunately, the ChainLink team does not offer a roadmap, but a testnet of ChainLink’s services should come sometime within Q1 of 2018. Generally, the project’s general lack of marketing and concrete updates have frustrated community members in the past. Sergey Nazarov, the project’s CEO, is known for a quiet community presence that favors of behind-the-scenes work on ChainLink. The team may not hype their project much, but for what it’s worth, they sacrifice brand marketing in favor of product development–and some community members find this focus to be refreshing. For instance, they’ve established an oracle with Swift Bank, and have a few quiet partnerships with zepplin_os and Request Network. Chainlink has the potential to connect smart contracts with the outside world. It may allow parties to smart contracts to be able to receive external inputs that prove performance and create payment outputs that end users want to receive, such as bank payments. This has the potential to allow smart contract to mimic the vast majority of financial agreements currently available in the market. With the ChainLink Network, anyone can securely provide smart contracts with access to key external data and any other API capabilities, in exchange for financial reward. Although it remains to be seen how the incentive system will operate, there is potential for rewards similar to those available for crypto miners to be available to Node Operators that provide useful data to the Chainlink network.' Check out CoinBureau for the complete review on Chainlink.