What is Aleo really like? Just read this one!
In the current Internet era, on the one hand, the Internet provides a lot of convenience to our daily life, on the other hand, the Internet is also constantly collecting all kinds of data, these seemingly scattered data aggregated into big data, almost everyone has become a “transparent person”, these data, once leaked or misappropriated, will cause us Privacy exposure and direct economic losses.
In 2020, a netizen reported that a fan secretly used the personal identity information of star Wu Lei, exchanging Wu Lei’s flight mileage points for plane tickets and using them for himself and his friends, and this situation has been going on for three years. Subsequently, a number of stars have posted that they have also suffered air miles theft, and this incident has concentrated on exposing the privacy troubles of this group of stars.
According to a survey data, 43.6% of China’s Internet users have encountered network security problems, which encountered the highest percentage of personal information leakage problems. In fact, the same privacy problems that exist on the Internet also exist on the blockchain.
02 Web3 privacy is indispensable
Let’s start with a brutal truth about the blockchain world: blockchain has no privacy at all.
With blockchain data analysis companies becoming more and more professional, coupled with the requirement of many exchanges for KYC real-name authentication of users, we can now easily tie a person’s real identity to his Web3 identity.
Moreover, almost all blockchains are now open and transparent, and users have no choice but to disclose their account balances, transaction information, and your every move on the blockchain, which is like making all your social media, Uber taxi records, Google search history, and emails public to others.
Imagine that you live in a house with only glass walls, but no curtains. Everyone passing by your house can see what you have and what you do, and that’s the cost of Web3 if there is no privacy.
And since blockchain data cannot be deleted once it is made public, your exposed privacy will remain on the blockchain forever.
Aleo is born to solve the pain point of privacy, starting from the most indispensable privacy of Web3, so that Web3 users can have a truly personalized and absolutely private Web3 world experience.
03 How Aleo solves the privacy pain point
So how does Aleo do it? We won’t talk about the extremely complicated technical principles here, I’ll give you the image example.
Just now we said that if you are a blockchain user, you are like living in a house with only glass walls but no curtains, and this situation is bothering you all the time.
What Aleo does to solve this blockchain pain point is to make every one of its users wear a cloak of invisibility.
In the real world, it is impractical to make an invisibility cloak, but in the world of blockchain, Aleo has successfully made an invisibility cloak so that people don’t know who you are, and what you do on the blockchain, people won’t know that you did it.
You may ask, is Aleo the first blockchain project that can make a similar “cloak of invisibility”? Actually, no, many projects have done it before, but the cloak they produced is difficult to be used on a large scale due to the capacity limitation.
But Aleo is the first blockchain project that can truly provide privacy to every ordinary blockchain user, so we say Aleo is a phenomenal blockchain project.
We will talk more about how Aleo has achieved mass production of the “cloak of invisibility” and “one for all” in the next article.
After talking about Aleo’s privacy solution, let’s learn more about Aleo’s team.
First of all, let’s look at the academic background of Aleo, which was born without some researchers from famous Web3 institutions such as Berkeley, Cornell, and Zcash, who have deep attainments in the field of zero-knowledge proofs. They have been at the forefront of the world in this field.
Aleo is standing on the shoulders of giants, integrating the most cutting-edge and promising zero-knowledge proof technologies in the Web3 industry, and the founding team of Aleo was formed in 2019.
CEO, CTO & Co-founder Howardwu (Howard Wu), who is a cryptography legend,A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, a hall of fame college in computing that is incredibly difficult for the general public to get into, he earned a dual master’s degree in applied mathematics and computer science with an undergraduate degree at Berkeley.
Howard has been working on blockchain technologies like Bitcoin since 2011, and has made some contributions to the codebase for Ether and Zcash. He then co-authored the paper “Zexe: Towards Decentralized Private Computing” with a friend, which caused a huge response in the industry upon publication, just like Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper for Bitcoin, which arguably laid the groundwork for what is now Aleo.
COO: Alex Pruden, Alex graduated from West Point, used to be a partner at a16z, also worked at Coinbase, and before that he was a member of the US Army Green Beret Special Forces, with strong social resources.
CGO Anthony DiPrinzio, Anthony is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with great experience in operational strategy, partnerships, and ecological development.
The investment agency a16z has publicly stated that the Aleo team is a world-class team. Even in the fast-paced Web3 industry, the Aleo team’s execution is the most impressive they have ever seen.
After spending nearly two years completing the development of the underlying blockchain framework, Aleo closed a $28 million Series A round of funding in April 2021, led by a16z with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Polychain Capital, Zero Knowledge Validator, the Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, and others participated.
Then on February 7, Aleo announced the completion of a $200 million Series B round of funding, with an equally lavish investment lineup, led by Kora Capital and SoftBank Vision Fund, and with participation from a16z, TigerGlobal and SeaCapital, Samsung Next, and SlowVentures. This is the highest valuation to date for a zero-knowledge privacy project and has generated a lot of interest in the Web3 industry.
a16z, known as Web3’s “investment weathervane”, has continuously invested in Aleo, which is enough to see how sought-after Aleo is in the primary market.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that the Series B round of $200 million is also the largest round of financing in Web3’s zero-knowledge track so far.
06 Aleo’s Privacy and Scaling Solutions
What’s really going on at Aleo? Just read this article! (a) In this article we sold a story: how exactly does Aleo produce stealth cloak and be able to make one for everyone?
In the blockchain network, what each of us exposes is actually account information and transaction information.
From the moment you have a blockchain account, Aleo can put an invisibility cloak on this account, and all the transactions you make through this account will be private, for example, if you transfer $2,000 to your friend, no one other than you and your friend will know that you initiated the transfer to this friend, because The transaction is private throughout.
This is possible because Aleo uses a cutting-edge blockchain cryptography technique: zero-knowledge proofs.
In the example of transferring money, zero-knowledge proofs allow users to transfer money with confidence without worrying about account owners, balances, transaction history, and other information being seen by others.
Based on zero-knowledge proofs, Aleo has good privacy and it also enables scaling.
How does it scale? Let’s still take the example of clothes, Aleo puts a cloak of invisibility on every account and every transaction, which is actually not simple and is a big challenge to the data processing ability of blockchain, which is very difficult, and this is one of the reasons why there are relatively few privacy projects in the blockchain industry.
So how does Aleo do it? We can think of a blockchain as a small factory, and this small factory is responsible for processing various transactions on top of the blockchain. Since the factory size is fixed, it is very limited in the number of transactions it can process every minute or every day, and it is very easy to congestion when the volume of transaction orders is large, and this kind of congestion is very common on blockchains such as ethereum.
Aleo has taken an innovative approach by having small blockchain factories outsource with a number of large factories. The small factories send transactions to the large factories, and these large factories then specialize in batch processing the transactions and passing the processing results back to the small factories. In this way, the processing capacity of small factories increases exponentially, which means that the efficiency of small factories in producing cloaks increases exponentially.
The big factories here are actually miners, who get the raw materials for the clothes from Aleo’s small factories, process them and send them back, so that the miners can get the “processing fee”, which is the “reward” paid to the miners by Aleo’s network.
Aleo is an open blockchain network on which developers can develop the privacy applications they want, and for this purpose, Aleo offers a rich infrastructure and development tools.
Among them, the Leo programming language and snarkOS have received the most attention.
The Leo language, developed by the Aleo team, is a programming language specifically designed for writing privacy applications. It is very easy to use, and developers do not need much cryptography to learn to use Leo.
Looking at the whole industry, there are only a few blockchain projects that can independently develop a programming language for their own blockchain ecosystem, which shows the strong technical strength of Aleo team.
snarkOS; you can think of snarkOS as an Apple or Android operating system in your phone, just like various apps in your phone now, you can run various blockchain applications on it in the future, unlike other blockchain projects, Aleo will bring strong versatility and privacy to these applications.
A good economic model is very important for blockchain projects, and the amount of “processing fees” miners can get from Aleo depends on Aleo’s economic model, which is very clear.
The block-out rate of the Aleo network is about one block every 20 seconds, and for the first 1–3 years after the founding block starts, each block awards 100 Aleo points, that’s almost 157.68 million Aleo points produced in a year. Relative to the initial issuance of 1 billion, then the incremental percentage for the first three years is about 12%-16%.
Then the block reward is halved every three years, in years 4–6 each block reward becomes 50 Aleo points, then in years 7–9 it becomes 25 points, after 9 years it becomes a stable reward of 12.5 Aleo points per block, maintaining a constant, no more halving.
As you can see, the Aleo economic model is more favorable for early miners, and the later you get, the less Aleo rewards you can get.
This is the end of our two Aleo introduction articles. If you have any questions about Aleo, please feel free to ask them in the background of the public number, and we will answer them for you at the first time.