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.
The Stellar network is an open source, distributed, and community owned network used to facilitate cross-asset transfers of value. Stellar aims to help facilitate cross-asset transfer of value at a fraction of a penny while aiming to be an open financial system that gives people of all income levels access to low-cost financial services. Stellar can handle exchanges between fiat-based currencies and between cryptocurrencies. Stellar.org, the organization that supports Stellar, is centralized like XRP and meant to handle cross platform transactions and micro transactions like XRP. However, unlike Ripple, Stellar.org is non-profit and their platform itself is open source and decentralized. Stellar was founded by Jed McCaleb in 2014. Jed McCaleb is also the founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple, launched the network system Stellar with former lawyer Joyce Kim. Stellar is also a payment technology that aims to connect financial institutions and drastically reduce the cost and time required for cross-border transfers. In fact, both payment networks used the same protocol initially. Distributed Exchange Through the use of its intermediary currency Lumens (XLM), a user can send any currency that they own to anyone else in a different currency. For instance, if Joe wanted to send USD to Mary using her EUR, an offer is submitted to the distributed exchange selling USD for EUR. This submitted offer forms is known as an order book. The network will use the order book to find the best exchange rate for the transaction in-order to minimize the fee paid by a user. This multi-currency transaction is possible because of 'Anchors'. Anchors are trusted entities that hold people’s deposits and can issue credit. In essence, Anchors serves as the bridge between different currencies and the Stellar network. Lumens (XLM) Lumens are the native asset (digital currency) that exist on the Stellar network that helps to facilitate multi-currency transactions and prevent spams. For multi-currency transactions, XLM is the digital intermediary that allows for such a transaction to occur at a low cost. In-order to prevent DoS attacks (aka spams) that would inevitably occur on the Stellar network, a small fee of 0.00001 XLM is associated with every transaction that occurs on the network. This fee is small enough so it does not significantly affect the cost of transaction, but large enough so it dissuades bad actors from spamming the network. The collected fee is then redistributed and added to an inflation pool. This inflation pool releases Lumens at a rate of 1% each year.