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.
Counterparty is a platform for user-created assets on Bitcoin. It’s a protocol, set of specifications, and an API. Taken together, it allows users to create and trade assets on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain. In this way, Counterparty is similar to platforms like Waves or Ethereum. Of course, the difference is Counterparty integrates directly with Bitcoin. Therefore, it comes will all the security and reliability (and issues) that are part of the Bitcoin blockchain. This is a fairly old project. In fact, it pre-dates Ethereum with its launch in 2014. It was the original asset creation mechanism. As you’re probably aware, Counterparty has faded from prominence over the years. This is largely due to the rise of the ERC-20 token standard on Ethereum. While we’ve become used to calling blockchain assets, tokens, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. An asset can represent anything that has value or is rare. As a result, Counterparty steers clear of the word “token” in their marketing and documentation. They’re much more interested in digital assets of all kinds, not just currencies, securities, and utility tokens. Digital assets can be a digital marker of a physical object, an easy way to manage shares in your company, or reputation karma for a website. These are all types of assets you could create on Counterparty (or Ethereum or Waves, for that matter). Counterparty creates the set of rules, requirements, integrations, etc that are necessary for assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s the infrastructure behind user-created assets in much the same way that the ERC-20 protocol sets up guidelines and standards for asset creation on Ethereum. One useful function of digital assets is as a marker of ownership or voting rights. Imagine a scenario where you issued a digital asset to each of your company’s board members in proportion to the amount of voting power held. Or if you gave your stockholders a digital asset as a marker of the amount of stock they owned. If you issued your stock asset, you could then use Counterparty’s distribution function to pay out dividends in BTC based on the amount of digital stock asset each person owned. Counterparty addresses many of the same issues as Ethereum or Waves, but on the Bitcoin blockchain. While that does come with some advantages, ultimately it is not as strong a platform for development as its competitors. It’s best suited for applications that need to interface with Bitcoin or assets that have a specific connection to the Bitcoin ecosystem.