Fun fact: the person who created Pony, Sylvan Clebsch, has been working on a Microsoft Research project called Verona. From it's README [0]:
> Project Verona is a research programming language to explore the concept of concurrent ownership. We are providing a new concurrency model that seamlessly integrates ownership.
Quite a bit of PL research is now going in very similar directions; trying to extend Rust's ownership model in a way that can express more patterns of code, while still being reasonably intuitive and ergonomic. (The PL community is already familiar with separation logic, which is quite general and powerful. The assumption is that a middle-of-the-road approach could be very helpful.)
Without bothering to look at it first, that sounds like interesting things will come from this. Let's hope they don't share the fate of Singularity/Midori.
> Project Verona is a research programming language to explore the concept of concurrent ownership. We are providing a new concurrency model that seamlessly integrates ownership.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/verona/tree/master