Layer-2 solutions on smart contract capable blockchains have become the order of the day.
They come with many advantages and also many risks.
We have seen many of these in the recent hacks that have sometimes cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
One of the few Layer-2 solutions to have proven its mettle in the face of all these uncertainties is Aventus.
The Aventus Network is known for its low fees on the Ethereum blockchain and other innovations that have rocked the cryptocurrency space and decentralized finance (DeFi) space.
They recently announced support for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It then means that anyone can with the Aventus Network mint NFTs on Ethereum for cheap!
This got us buzzing and we decided to reach out to them to find out more.
Here is what Alan Vey, Co-Founder and CEO of Aventus had to say about this and a lot more.
Alan Vey Co-Founder and CEO at Aventus
E-Crypto News:
Please, can you tell us more about the Aventus upgrades?
The recent NFT upgrade to Aventus Network platform architecture will facilitate new NFT partnerships that will reshape and reignite the market.
Creators can now mint NFTs on the Aventus Network mainnet for a fraction of the cost of any other blockchain network. Aventus NFTs are fully compatible with Ethereum NFTs, and therefore can be moved seamlessly from one blockchain to another.
What’s more, unlike other NFT blockchains, the NFT-Manager pallet on the Aventus Blockchain is designed to support Royalties and is directly built into the Blockchain.
This ensures that creators who should receive royalties have a provable claim via an immutable ledger, on their royalties.
This major upgrade for NFTs broadens the network’s appeal as a full-service blockchain solution for any sector, any application, and any innovation.
E-Crypto News:
What is the general concept behind the Aventus network?
We love the Ethereum network, but it has become a victim of its own success.
It lacks long-term scalability, and ‘gas’ fees (the cost to make a transaction) have gone through the roof, making the network unusable for many.
Aventus Network is a layer-2 solution that lets you process transactions on top of the Ethereum network — and other chains — at 100x the speed and scale and at just 1% of the typical cost.
E-Crypto News:
What are the values that drive the Aventus network?
Many blockchain companies spend a great deal of time and effort to produce solutions in search of problems.
This fundamental problem is something we are acutely aware of at Aventus, and so we have always sought out problems first, and then built the solution through innovation.
We are also committed to making sure that blockchain isn’t just for Christmas. Crypto technologies are changing and innovating at a rate of knots – and with increasingly widespread adoption, the technology is here to stay.
It is of the utmost importance that any technology built now will still work on blockchain networks in months, years and decades to come.
That’s why interoperability and access are right at the core of our project.
E-Crypto News:
Please, can you tell us more about the team behind Aventus?
There are four members of the Aventus senior leadership team.
CEO Alan Vey is a Forbes 30 under 30 winner who co-founded Aventus as part of his master’s thesis at Imperial College London.
CCO Anna Frankowska is also a Forbes 30 under 30 winner and an experienced entrepreneur and economist by training.
CTPO Andrey Brozhko has over 20 years of experience leading product and software engineering efforts including at R3 and Oracle.
CSO Andrew Shackleton is a high-performance operational leader with over 15 successful years’ in delivering multi-million pound global digital programmes with a clear focus on increasing profitability, client satisfaction, ROI and revenue growth.
The leadership is supported by a talented development and tech team as well as advisors including Daniel Masters, blockchain entrepreneur and Executive Chairman at CoinShares, and William Knottenbelt, Professor of Applied Quantitative Analysis in the Department of Computing and Director of the Imperial College Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering.
E-Crypto News:
As a layer-2 solution, what has Aventus brought to the table that makes it the Ethereum Layer-2 solution of choice?
Aventus is built from the ground up to be enterprise-grade, appealing to large organisations requiring millions of annual transactions.
What’s more, building on Substrate, Aventus is designed as a layer-2 not just for Ethereum, but for Polkadot and beyond, with the goal of enabling mass blockchain adoption through cross-chain functionality.
Aventus gives enterprises the scale, speed, and cost they need, while maintaining security, across multiple blockchain networks.
Related: Op Ed: How Layer 2 Protocols Can Improve Bitcoin for Remittances
E-Crypto News:
What are the new NFT capabilities that Aventus has introduced?
Creators can now mint NFTs on the Aventus Network mainnet for a fraction of the cost of any other blockchain network.
Aventus NFTs are fully compatible with Ethereum NFTs, and therefore can be moved seamlessly from one blockchain to another.
What’s more, unlike other NFT blockchains, the NFT-Manager pallet on the Aventus Blockchain is designed to support Royalties and is directly built into the Blockchain.
This ensures that creators who should receive royalties have a provable claim via an immutable ledger, on their royalties.
E-Crypto News:
How has Aventus made decentralized finance (DeFi) easy for everyday people?
When we think of the term DeFi, many think of NFTs or DeFi pools – where people stake cryptocurrency to earn revenue.
The reality is that DeFi is a much broader term than this – and really means any system of finance that cuts out the middleman – like a bank or other intermediary – and enables transactions to take place peer-to-peer, mediated by a smart contract held in blockchain.
In this sense, Aventus is fundamentally built to enable DeFi.
It’s approach to layer-2 Ethereum enables decentralized smart contracts and transactions on a massive scale, enabling organizations and their customers to reap the benefits of decentralized ledgers without any of the problems associated with Ethereum – like high gas fees.
Furthermore we have just launched extensive NFT functionality, enabling cross chain interoperability and will be announcing a bunch of customers across music, fashion, sports and art.
Also the Aventus staking scheme has been active earning participating AVT token holders fees from over 18m transactions we have been processing since February.
Related: What Are The Major Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Ecosystem Problems?
E-Crypto News:
What do you think will be the future of Ethereum as we move closer to ETH 2.0?
Ethereum is and continues to be a hub of innovation.
It blazed the trail for the whole smart contract space, and still acts as the foundation for the vast majority of blockchain applications today.
Fundamentally, Ethereum is going nowhere any time soon, and remains an incredibly powerful tool in blockchain – despite its many issues which we solve as a layer-2 solution.
When it comes to Eth 2.0, there has been a lot of scepticism in the community about the network.
Over the past two years, the Eth 2.0 roadmap has been punctuated by a number of delays, criticisms around user experience, concerns about security, and speculation that the updates may not go far enough for wider spread adoptions.
Eth 2.0s problem is that it’s trying to be a jack of all trades – and a master of none. 4
I am sure that it will be a major landmark for the blockchain community, but bespoke, more specialised blockchains which are interoperable with other projects will be front-and-centre of widespread adoption of the technologies.
Despite some of the negativity surrounding ETH 2.0 one thing that can be said is unlike others that had started gaining on Ethereum (like Solana), Ethereum has had very few production issues around downtime and major bugs.
Almost all issues in the Ethereum ecosystem have been based on third party implementation, not base Ethereum vulnerabilities.
So whilst things may be moving slower than many might hope, the integrity of the evolution seems to be in tact.
Related : Everything You Need to Know About Ethereum 2.0
E-Crypto News:
How did you get involved with cryptocurrencies and their allied technologies?
The truth: Silk Road. But lets not go for that.
I got involved in 2012 when I started my undergraduate CS degree.
I always had a deep interest in Maths, Economics and Computer Science and this was the perfect application for those interests.
Seeing how we could create digital scarcity was revolutionary and I learned as much as I could until I probably could have implemented a simple version of the network myself.
When Ethereum launched in 2015 is where the real applications exploded beyond pure crypto currencies.
E-Crypto News:
What do you think the future holds for DeFi?
We are only just beginning to skim the surface of DeFi’s capabilities.
Using the early days of the internet as a comparison, the way that we currently use DeFi is not dissimilar to the very first online forum, or a basic email protocol.
If you take any time that a ledger is used in any industry – car insurance, real estate ownership, supply chain finance – DeFi or some kind of derivative could easily play a part in the not-so-distant future.
I think that widespread adoption of DeFi will only really start to happen when people stop thinking of the word DeFi before the functionality.
Nowadays, nobody says ‘I run an internet business’ – they say they run a business because everyone has a website.
The same future awaits DeFi – it will become a part of day-to-day business.
E-Crypto News:
How does Aventus help improve the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies and their allied technologies?
Mass adoption requires interoperability.
Currently, with so many different blockchains, it’s like having a gmail account and only being able to send email to other gmail users.
Key to the Aventus mission is enabling the mass adoption of blockchain through interoperability — being able to process transactions across multiple or even all chains.
Related:Editorial: The Crypto Maze-Cryptocurrency Adoption and Regulation are Coming
E-Crypto News:
How has 2021 been for the Aventus project?
2021 has been our best year yet.
The pandemic hit us hard as it did everyone, but in February 2021 we launched our main net and began processing the first of more than 18.5m historical transactions.
We have added partnerships with Live Nation France, Fruitlab, Vow Currencies, cashbackAPP, and more.
Our staking program is now live and stakers, acting as transaction validators, are now earning their share of transaction fees.
E-Crypto News:
Please, can you give us practical use-case scenarios where Aventus’ infrastructure has been deployed?
Aventus Network has many use cases.
To date, these include gaming, loyalty programs, ticketing and more.
Aventus helped CashbackAPP increase their net margins by as much as 25% in just six months in multiple business jurisdictions through vowcurrency.com.
As a business that gives users cashback on purchases, they were able to restructure their loyalty debt obligation on their balance sheet, reduce transaction fees, and improve treasury management while providing customers with more prompt payment.
Set to launch in the coming months, Aventus has been working with fruitlab, a community platform for gamers, to develop a value token to reward creators for their content and engage their fans.
E-Crypto News:
Do you have any plans to support other blockchains and ledgers in the future? Please, can you tell us about this?
We’re building on Polkadot’s substrate, which means Aventus Network will be able to process transactions on Ethereum and Polkadot.
This is a key part of our mission in enabling interoperability of blockchains long term.
E-Crypto News:
How is Aventus able to reduce transactions to less than 90% of the Ethereum average? How does the mechanism of transaction confirmation within the Aventus ecosystem work?
We build on Polkadot’s open source infrastructure called substrate and have forked it for our implementation.
We operate a proof of stake system which means we do not need to burn anywhere near the same amount of energy as Ethereum to reach consensus, this is done more through economic game theory using the AVT token.
Furthermore we derive our security from Ethereum (and in the future polkadot) which means we can take certain short cuts to deliver greater throughput and lower fees.
E-Crypto News:
What are your plans for Generation Z?
Generation Z is spending more and more time in the digital realm.
The need for robust economic structures within metaverses and similar is increasing and blockchain enables the economies and collectibles helping to blur the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds.
E-Crypto News:
Where do you see Aventus in the next five years?
We are targeting hitting 1bn transactions within the next couple of years and further expanding the industries we are active within including Aviation, Super market supply chains and beyond.
It is all about adoption and getting our network near maximum capacity.
As layer 2 solutions we all have huge availible capacity that is not being used and our strategy is to help existing businesses with real users and use cases augment their offerings with blockchain where appropriate.
E-Crypto News:
Please, can you tell us more about the ability to natively enforce NFT royalties on Aventus?
While the ERC721 standard remains the most recognised NFT standard, it does not support Royalties.
Users who own NFTs have to depend on 3rd party integrations and platforms to handle royalties. Hence, royalties for the NFTs are not enforced by the Blockchain.
The NFT-Manager pallet on the Aventus Blockchain is designed to support Royalties and is directly built into the Blockchain.
This ensures that creators who should receive royalties have a provable claim via an immutable ledger, on their royalties.
E-Crypto News:
If you had three wishes and a Genie that could make them come true, what would they be for Aventus and the cryptocurrency space?
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Intelligent, detailed regulation to give businesses the security to adopt blockchain and companies in the blockchain industry a proper rule book to follow.
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Significant adoption and the recognition from the market of our strong fundamentals.
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The ability to attract and retain the best talent going forward, because at the end of the day it is always about people.
