If you are interested in privacy-oriented digital currencies, you might have heard of Aeon Coin. You can use Aeon Coin (AEON) to make anonymous payments thanks to its security and privacy features.
Aeon Coin started off as a hardfork of Monero (XMR) back in 2014. It combines the signature privacy features of Monero with a lightweight proof-of-work algorithm in order to make the cryptocurrency easier to store and mine on mobile devices.
Aeon Coin is an open-source community project and the current lead developer, known by the alias “smooth” also works on Monero. Overall, Aeon aims to become a private, secure, and untraceable network that can be accessed by anyone with a smartphone.
We prepared a short guide on Aeon Coin that explores its privacy features along with some practical information about how to mine and store the digital currency.
What Is a Privacy-Oriented Cryptocurrency?
Privacy oriented cryptocurrencies, or privacy coins for short, have become more and more popular over the years as crypto communities realized that Bitcoin and most altcoins can be easily traced through blockchains, destroying the myth of anonymity that clung to digital currencies in the first years after their launch. These days, government agencies can easily track stolen coins through wallet addresses on the blockchain with the help of blockchain analysis technology. That makes criminal activities like money laundering especially problematic for cryptocurrency hackers and thieves, but also threatens individual users’ privacy.
Privacy coins, unlike regular digital assets, use a mix of different methods to prevent tracing transactions on the blockchain. Monero, ZCash, DASH, and Bytecoin are some of the most popular privacy coins on the market. Privacy coins have become popular in recent years, though some cryptocurrency exchanges started to delist privacy coins due to regulatory pressure from authorities concerned about their criminal abuses.
What Makes AEON Private?
AEON uses a lightweight version of the CryptoNote protocol that Monero utilizes in order to prevent transactions from being traced. CryptoNight-Lite, AEON’s proof-of-work algorithm, uses less RAM memory compared to other cryptocurrency hashing algorithms and makes it easier to mine the digital currency.
AEON employs several privacy measures including ring signatures and one-time keys. Ring signatures allow the AEON Network to mix sender addresses, which means a transaction can’t be traced back to a single address but to a pool of possible sender addresses instead.
Users can also produce one-time keys through cryptography that allow them to encrypt the receivers’ public addresses.
AEON also boasts resistance to blockchain analysis, similar to other privacy coins. Blockchain analysis can be used to trace cryptocurrency transactions on public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but privacy coins take measures that complicate tracing attempts.
How Is AEON Different from Monero?
While wholesale anonymity may not be possible with any cryptocurrency, AEON approaches the ideal pretty well, like its more heavy-duty cousin Monero. The main difference between the two cryptocurrencies is AEON’s size. Designed as a lightweight cryptocurrency, AEON is much smaller than Monero and is more mobile-friendly. Thanks to the CryptoNight-Lite protocol, AEON can be mined with CPUs and GPUs, so miners without ASIC rigs can also successfully get block rewards.
AEON Blockchain also employs “blockchain pruning”, which is the removal of unnecessary information from the blockchain. Blockchain pruning means the size of the blockchain grows slowly, preventing scalability problems that plague other digital currencies like Ethereum.
Aeon Coin’s total supply is around 18 million coins, and there are already more than 15 million coins in circulation. It takes around four minutes to mine an AEON Block, twice Monero’s block time of two minutes.
What Is an AEON Wallet?
You need to download the official AEON Coin wallet in order to store your Aeon Coins safely. You can download the AEON coin wallet or AEON GUI (Graphic User Interface) from AEON’s github page or its official website. The wallet can be used with Linux, MacOS, and Windows operating systems.
It is easy to set up the wallet once you download and install the program. Once you create a new wallet, make sure you write down seed recovery phrases the program provides as these words are the only way to backup and restore your wallet. The wallet also allows you to set a password so that nobody else can access the wallet even if they have your computer.
You can also find AEON wallets online, but you are better off avoiding these unofficial wallets.
How to Track AEON’s Price?
You can track AEON prices and the market cap for circulating supply through CoinMarketCap. Most centralized crypto exchanges don’t list AEON, and decentralized exchanges lack trading volume and liquidity. You can purchase AEON from TradeOgre and Bittrex. AEON is also listed on HitBTC but it is not possible to make deposits and withdrawals as the exchange refuses to update the latest wallet software.
You need BTC to buy AEON as it isn’t possible to exchange the digital currency for fiat currency (like USD or EUR) on cryptocurrency exchanges.
A Few Words Before You Go…
Launched as a fork of Monero, Aeon Coin is a privacy oriented cryptocurrency that aims to become a mobile friendly anonymous payment service. AEON has a smaller blockchain and a lighter proof-of-work mechanism that makes it suitable for CPU and GPU miners. You can follow Aeon Coin developments through its Bitcointalk forum topic, Github page, and the official Aeon.cash website.
