Aion Owner's Manual

General Information

Aion Overview

The Aion multi-tier blockchain network is like a computer network, providing a protocol and standard for dissimilar systems to communicate. However, in addition to information, the Aion network will pass logic and value among participating blockchains to create a contiguous value chain where every transaction occurs on-chain, with logic and value passing among chains as freely as liquid assets.

Aion is a multi-tier 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.

AION-1

The Aion-1 blockchain is the genesis implementation of the connecting network. It is designed to be a fair, distributed, open blockchain architecture that is capable of fulfilling the requirements specified in the multi-tier blockchain network architecture. As an open blockchain, Aion-1 was designed with the following goals:

• Connecting blockchains and external services (e.g., oracles and databases) together through the contiguous network and providing accountable communication maintained through a decentralized network.

• Providing the necessary infrastructure to develop high-performance, decentralized, inter-blockchain applications.

• Creating a maintainable network through a robust and sustainable economic model.

Users will be able to deploy adjacent participating networks suitable for their own use cases and communicate with other networks through an accountable routing architecture. Users ranging from large enterprises hosting consortium networks to community-oriented open networks are all welcome to participate. In the future, decentralized applications could sit on top of the connecting network with logic driven by integrating data from a multitude of blockchain networks. In addition, the Aion-1 blockchain is equipped with a full-functioning economic system intended to drive the continued maintenance and integrity of the network.

Using the Owner’s Manual

This owner’s manual is intended as a walkthrough guide to help users install Aion and start using its various features. It is intended for non-developers who want to rapidly start participating in the Aion Network ecosystem. This can be in the form of running an Aion node, mining, creating a local wallet, transacting Aion and more. Once you are ready, you can go to Getting Started to download the binary. You can also visit the tutorials within the docs for specific examples on the user functionalities. For further information, please read through the FAQs section to find common issues, concerns and general questions. We want the information in this manual to be accessible in a single place, streamlining the experience of first-time users of Aion.

Please visit the Error Handling section in the Appendix to reach the Aion team for any additional questions/concerns.

Links

For more information on Aion, the architecture, and a deeper dive into the components, please check out the Aion Technical Introduction here.

To access Aion’s source code and begin contributing to this open-source project, please visit the Aion Github Wiki here.

Getting Started

System requirements

Below are the requirements for setting up and running the kernel.

• Ubuntu 16.04 or a later version

• CUDA 9.0 compatible driver (NVIDIA 387.34+) for GPU based mining. (optional)

Installation

KERNEL

Getting the kernel

The latest version of Aion kernel will be constantly released during the Public Testnet phase. You can acquire access to the most recent Aion binary file here.

Once you have the binary file, you will need to unarchive the contents in your chosen destination using one of the following methods:

A. Right click on the file and select Extract Here.

B. Open a terminal and run the following command:

tar xvjf aion-{version}.tar.bz2

A folder named aion will be created in the chosen directory.

Configuration

• Creating accounts

Account addresses are required for mining and sending transactions. An address is a 64-character (32 byte) hex string, which contains the public key of an account. You can create accounts on the kernel by following these steps:

1. Go to aion directory

2. Open a terminal and run the following command:

./aion.sh -a create

3. Input your chosen password once prompted

4. Copy the created account address shown.

After account creation, an associated keystore file is generated and placed in the aion/keystore directory. Each keystore file name contains the address and can be referred to in case of lost account address.

Note

You should backup the keystore folder if you want to keep the generated keys.

• Generating peer Id (optional)

Note Aion kernel versions below 0.1.9 require a node Id to be placed in the configuration file. For version 0.1.9 and higher, this step is optional since a temporary unique Id will be assigned to the node at runtime.

A permanent node Id can be used by peers to connect to each other. Instructions for generating and assigning a node Id are as follows: 1. Download the Id generation script generateId.sh from here.

2. Open a terminal and add executable permissions to the script using the following command.

chmod +x generateId.sh

3. Run the script using the following command.

./generateId.sh

4. Copy the output.

5. Navigate to the config.xml file in the aion directory (aion/config/config.xml):

6. Open the config.xml using a text editor or run the following command in terminal:

gedit config.xml

7. Update the value between the id tags to the copied Id.

<id>my-new-id-value-is-set-here-12345678</id>

• Setting up seed nodes (optional)

Your kernel will have access to the seed nodes by default. You should not remove these nodes from the configuration. Additional peers can be added to configuration by updating the nodes section and including peer id, port, and IP. Peer Id for a node should be generated using the steps mentioned above.

<nodes> <node>p2p://PEER_ID@IP:PORT</node> </nodes>

• Setting up IP

To allow connection among peers the ip section of the config file should be updated to include a public IP. If you are unsure about having a public IP, set it to 0.0.0.0.

<p2p> <ip>0.0.0.0</ip> <port>30303</port> </p2p>

Launch kernel

Go to the aion directory and run the following command in the terminal to launch the kernel.

./aion.sh

Note You can set show-status to true in your config file to prompt the network to display connected peers.

<show-status>true</show-status>

Alternatively, you can open another terminal and run the command below to view connected peers:

netstat -antp | grep java

MINER

There are two types of miners that can work with the kernel, Internal and External miner.

Internal miner

The internal miner runs on the local node and is provided with the kernel. It can be configured by modifying the config.xml file in aion directory (aion/config/config.xml). In order to setup internal mining, the following fields should be updated in consensus section:

• Mining: should be set to true to enable mining

• Miner-address: the wallet address that will collect AION for mining blocks. The account address created in creating accounts section can be used for this purpose.

• Cpu-mine-threads: number of logical CPU cores to use for mining. This number should be between 1 and 75% of your maximum CPU logical cores. The number of logical cores

may be seen in either task manager (Windows) or system monitor (Ubuntu). It is not recommended to go above 75% of the total logical cores.

• extraData: any hex string up to 32 bytes

A sample config file following internal mining configuration is shown below. Once the config file has been updated, the kernel should pick up the mining settings next time it is launched. Mining is normally delayed 10 seconds to allow sufficient time for the kernel to fully start.

<consensus> <mining>true</mining> <miner-address>0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000111</miner-address> <cpu-mine-threads>2</cpu-mine-threads> <extra-data>MyAion</extra-data> </consensus>

External miner

CPU and GPU-CUDA miners are provided as options for external mining. These miners are designed to be used in conjunction with the provided reference mining pool. Future miner versions will be adapted to join public pools. The provided reference pool requires more advanced Ubuntu configuration; if you are not comfortable with the Ubuntu terminal we recommend using the internal kernel miner.

Follow these steps to run the external miner: 1. Download a pre-built miner binary from the aion_miner release page.

2. Once you have the binary file, open a terminal and run the following command:

tar xvjf aionminer-{type}-{version}.bz2

3. Run the aionminer file by setting up desired parameter values. Sample commands to run the miner are as follows:

CPU

Following the instructions runs AION CPU miner with 4 threads connecting to a mining pool running locally, listening on port 3333 for incoming connections.

./aionminer-cpu -t 4 -l 127.0.0.1:3333

Here is an example of running a benchmark on your CPU using a single thread:

./aionminer-cpu -b -t 1

GPU

Following the instructions runs AION CUDA miner with 64 blocks and 64 threads per block on device 0 using solver version 1 (CUDA Tromp).

./aionminer -cd 0 -cv 1 -cb 64 -ct 64

Here is an example of running a benchmark on your GPU (GPU 0, CUDA-Tromp solver):

./aionminer -cd 0 -cv 1 -cb 64 -ct 64 -b

General miner parameters:

-h [help] Print this help message and quits -l [location] Stratum server:port -u [username] Username (aion address) -a [port] Local API port (default: 0 = do not bind) -d [level] Debug print level (0 : print all, 5 : fatal only, default: 2) -b [ --benchmark ] [=arg(=200)] Run in benchmark mode (default: 200 iterations)

Extra parameters for CPU miner:

-t [threads] Number of CPU threads -e [ext] Force CPU ext (0 = SSE2, 1 = AVX, 2 = AVX2)

Extra parameters for CUDA miner:

-ci CUDA info -cv CUDA solver (0 = djeZo, 1 = tromp, default=1)

-cd Enable mining on spec. devices

-cb Number of blocks (per device)

-ct Number of threads per block (per device)