The Aeternity protocol is a highly efficient and secure Erlang-based scalable smart contract platform designed to accommodate enterprise-scale use cases. Aeternity seeks to address inefficiencies of competitor technologies by utilising sharding, highly-scalable dApps and state channels for trustless off-chain smart contract execution and settlement without off-chain fees. This increases the speed of transaction times and increases privacy by keeping contract data off of the main blockchain. Aeternity also removes the need for intermediaries and third parties by utilising on-chain smart contract arbitration. Aeternity has high-security standards with a type-safe Virtual Machine, and the Turing-complete smart contracts on the Aeternity protocol are written in Sophia, a functional Smart Contract language in the ML family. AE is the native token of the Aeternity protocol. AE tokens are mined using the Cuckoo Cycle proof of work algorithm. In addition to miners, node operators and developers, the Aeternity protocol is governed by AE token holders.