Exchange Automata Network (ATA)

Automata (ATA) is a native token of the Automata Network — a privacy-focused cross-chain solution for the distributed Internet, or Web3. Automata was launched in 2021.

Despite blockchain’s focus on confidentiality, dishonest actors use constantly evolving technologies and tricks to get user data. This means that even the blockchains that proved to be well-protected against the known “Big Bad” events like Sybil or 51% attacks can have other vulnerabilities. 

Today’s ML and analytics are capable of extracting a lot of sensitive information based on some incidental patterns — which, for example, become available to the public in the blockchain governance process. Another example is MEV, or the transaction order manipulation within a block being mined, like frontrunning. This is done to improve a miner’s revenue at the expense of others.

Automata acts as a middleware solution for those privacy issues. Its architecture contains four interconnected layers, or planes:

1. Ledger plane, which represents blockchains;
2. Control plane, which routes both tasks and fees acquired from the ledger plane to the compute plane, and also controls the node registration in the network. The nodes constituting this plane are called Automata Validators;
3. Compute plane, which consists of Automata Geode nodes executing the tasks. Geodes utilize Oblivious RAM technologies and other ways to obfuscate the traces of data, even from themselves;
4. Service layer, which can host third-party privacy services. 

The vital part of this network is the ATA token, which can be used for governance, mining rewards, network usage fees, and participating in Geode auctions.