Everything You Need to Know About AEON Coin

Aeon Coin (AEON) is a hard fork of Monero that touts itself as a lightweight version of Monero. This article will cover a basic rundown of everything you need to know about this lightweight privacy coin, which will include the price, where to buy AEON, how the project operates, and some differences between it and its big brother Monero.

What is AEON?

As mentioned previously, AEON is a hard fork of Monero founded on June 6th, 2014. It maintained the same privacy features of Monero while greatly reducing the resource intensiveness of Monero.

AEON differentiated itself in a few ways that we will cover in the below sections.

Mobile Friendly

First, AEON touts itself as a mobile friendly version. This does appear to be true in theory because it is a more lightweight version of Monero. 

However, the problem is that the mobile infrastructure for AEON is actually lower than Monero. What do we mean?

Well, it’s actually possible to mine Monero on your mobile device with a mobile app called MinerGate. This used to be possible with AEON, but that changed in 2019 due to changes in the AEON mining protocol.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a mobile miner for AEON nor is there a mobile wallet. Monero has both a mobile wallet and the ability to mine it from a mobile device, so we will say that while AEON claims it is more mobile friendly than AEON the opposite is actually true. 

Monero is more mobile friendly than AEON!

Longer Block Time

This difference is more substantial than the mobile difference between the two and starts to get to the point about AEON being much more lightweight than Monero. 

The block size of AEON is double that of Monero. AEON’s block time is four minutes while Monero’s block time is two minutes. What does this mean for AEON?

It means that AEON produces 50% less blocks per day than Monero, which makes it much more efficient to operate an AEON node than a Monero node. 

This difference is the main reason that AEON is a much lighter weight option than Monero.

Smaller Ring Size

Finally, the ring size of AEON is substantially less than that of Monero. AEON’s ring size is 3 while Monero’s is 11. 

We do admit that this reduces the privacy of the coin a little bit in theory. However, in practice the privacy of the coin is still maintained while greatly reducing the transaction time and blockchain bloat. 

AEON is open to increasing the ring size if evidence comes out that more rings increase security or reduce other problems. But at the moment there is no evidence that 3 rings are less than 11 rings in practice (only hypothetically).

Who Founded AEON?

As you might have guessed, the founder of a privacy coin such as AEON prefers to remain anonymous. 

With that in mind, AEON was founded by the user “Aeon” on the Bitcointalk forum. Aeon announced the launch of the coin on June 6th and indicated that he (or she) did not pre-mine the currency, which greatly increased the trustworthiness of the project in the eyes of the community.

Anyway, Aeon eventually transferred control of the project to another user on Bitcointalk called “Smooth” in 2015. Smooth still runs the project to this day.

It’s also interesting to note that Smooth has claimed he is some sort of developer for Monero. And that the official AEON website (https://www.aeon.cash/en/home/) has “The Monero Project” in the footer. 

This brings up an interesting relationship between Monero and AEON that has not been fully disclosed by either project.

AEON- Price, Market Cap, and Wallet Information

This section will cover details about the price and market cap of AEON. We will also provide links where you can download the different AEON wallets. 

AEON Price

The current price of AEON is approximately $1.60 at the time of writing. This is a far way off from its all-time high of slightly over $8 at the beginning of 2018. 

However, as we always say, almost all altcoins reached absurd all-time highs in 2018 that most of them have not been able to match at the time of writing.

The good news is that AEON has seen a massive spike at the beginning of 2021. The price at the start of 2021 was approximately $0.20, which means the current price is an 800% increase over just a few months.

Those are extremely good returns, even for cryptocurrency.

AEON Market Cap

Despite the price increase, the market cap of AEON remains relatively small at only $25 million. This ranks it as the 774th most popular cryptocurrency by market cap.

For comparison, Monero’s market cap is $5.7 billion and it ranks as the 27th most popular cryptocurrency by market cap.

AEON obviously has a long way to go before it can flip Monero.

AEON Wallets

This section will cover the four different wallets available for use with AEON.

AEON GUI Wallet

AEON has a GUI wallet available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This wallet does require you to download the entire blockchain as it is a full node wallet, but it’s an official, secure wallet. Here are links to download the wallets for their respective operating systems:

AEON Windows GUI Wallet

Mac

Linux

AEON Paper Wallet

It is also possible to create an AEON paper wallet. You can use MoneroAddress.org to create a paper wallet. We do not recommend a paper wallet for beginners because they’re difficult to set up securely and losing the keys is easy since they’re written on a piece of paper.

A paper wallet is the safest option if you know what you’re doing, though.

Final Thoughts

Well, that’s about it for everything you need to know about AEON – it’s a lighter weight version of Monero, basically. You can think of it this way:

Litecoin is to Bitcoin as AEON is to Monero.

The main difference is that AEON is not nearly as popular as Monero, but it does have potential as privacy coins continue to gain popularity.

It’s certainly a cryptocurrency that we would watch out for in the coming years.