Aleo Project Background
Aleo is mainly engaged in the ZK privacy public chain project. The team has raised more than 200 million US dollars. As a heavyweight VC project coin, the team recently launched the last incentive event before the mainnet launch. It is also the only highlight event after the two major projects ZK and L0.
ALEO has raised funds twice, in Series A and Series B. The Series A was led by a16z, with participation from Placeholder VC, Galaxy Digital, Variant Capital and Coinbase Ventures. The Series B raised 200M, led by Kora Management LP and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Tiger Global and Sea Capital. Basically, all the participants are top institutions. It is also known as the largest financing project in the field of zero-knowledge proof.
Aleo uses ZPK technology to verify the validity of transactions without disclosing transaction details, ensuring privacy while also ensuring the security and transparency of transactions.
Token Allocation
The initial total amount of Aleo tokens is 1.5 billion, which will be used to reward early supporters. New Aleo tokens will be distributed to ecosystem participants through POS and POW. The Aleo token distribution is mainly as follows:
8% to strategic partners
15% for team members and project contributors
17% to Aleo and Aleo Foundation
25% to various service providers
35% to early supporters
Aleo's incentive activities are different from ZK and L0. The main difference is that Aleo is an open airdrop. As long as you participate according to the rules, you can get rewards, just like the previous IOnet. Users need to contribute the computing power of their computing devices to run the Prover program to obtain points rewards, and then divide the tokens of this incentive test network according to the total points obtained.
The official will distribute 1 million tokens in this event. The official plans to launch the mainnet in August. The code has been audited and is in a frozen state.
Incentivized Testnet Mining Preparation
The official has conducted two incentive testing activities before this incentive test. The last one was in 2022. Users get points rewards by running the prover program through the graphics card. The exchange ratio of points to tokens is 5:1. Due to the change in the mining algorithm this year, the original GPU mining program is no longer available. Therefore, in the first two days of the incentive activity, participants mainly mined through the CPU. However, some mining pools and teams have launched GPU mining programs, but the calculation is also mainly based on the CPU, and the GPU's computing power in mining does not account for a high proportion.
The mining power is mainly related to the number of CPU cores, because the majority of the calculation is in the number of cores, so the more cores there are, the higher the power. The GPU needs to support CUDA, and common AMD high-end CPUs, INTEL E5 foreign garbage, and I3-I9-level CPUs above the 10th generation can participate. The general power is below 100 p/s, and the power will be increased to between 200-600 with a GPU graphics card. A small number of high-end CPUs will increase the power to more than 1000.
Mining is divided into two types: SOLO and mining pool. During this incentive activity, solo mining requires more than 1,000 points, which is not friendly to retail investors. Therefore, for ordinary users, it is better to participate in the mining pool, which also saves the KYC process.
Mining pool selection: Currently, the main mining pools are 1to, zkrush, f2pool, etc. They all have their own mining software. 1to and zkrush are mainly CPU mining, and f2pool provides GPU mining programs (CPU is the main, GPU mainly plays a supporting role and cannot run at full capacity). If you use CPU mining, you can consider zkrush (the team has optimized the CPU mining program well). If you use GPU, you can consider f2pool, but you cannot connect to the mining pool directly, and you need to use a transfer service.
In addition, if you want to use solo mining, you can consider using f3, which also provides GPU programs. Similar to f2pool, the GPU cannot be fully utilized.
The computer system used for mining is Linux, and the Desktop version of Ubuntu can generally be considered. If you want to mine under Windows, you can consider using the services of the H9 mining pool, but the CPU mining efficiency of H9 is very low and not very cost-effective. It is recommended to install Linux directly if conditions permit. After the Linux installation is complete, you need to install the CUDA Linux version software (which can be ignored if you only use the CPU for mining).
For the convenience of management, it is generally necessary to install Sunflower or Rustdesk remote management software. Both software have corresponding Linux versions. Rustdesk can be easily managed within the local area network with low latency and smooth operation. Sunflower can be remotely managed under any network, and the latency is related to the network speed.
Tutorial
Let’s take the fish pond as an example:
Download mining software, download address of F2Pool:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18SwOMRomwh6xHvY3WAKNQ9up7FZP2fOU?usp=drive_link
After downloading, decompress it. If you use the server version of the system, you can upload the downloaded program to GitHub, download it using wget on GitHub, and then decompress it using the unzip command.
Modify permissions
chmod +x aleo.sh && chmod +x aleo-miner
Execute Instructions
./aleo.sh stratum+tcp://aleo-asia.f2pool.com:4400 accountname.workername
Here, accountname is the username you registered in F2Pool, and workername can be any name.
For example, cnchina.w01 will do.
After completion, we can check the log to see the real-time mining process
tail -f aleo-miner.log
After mining is running, the CPU usage will increase. We can view it through the system monitor, or we can open another terminal window and run the top command to view it.
If the mining software crashes, we can press Ctrl+C on the keyboard to close the log output and then run
pkill -9 aleo-miner
Then re-run the above mining instructions.
To view the GPU usage of the graphics card, you can use the following command:
nvidia-smi
The usage of the graphics card is mainly related to the CPU. The higher the number of CPU cores, the higher the graphics card usage. If we see aleo-miner (the yellow part in the picture) on this interface, it means that the graphics card is working. If not, it means that our CUDA program or driver is not installed correctly and needs to be reinstalled.
View Benefits
Open https://www.f2pool.com/user/worker
You can check and switch the upper right corner to Aleo, and then you can view the computing power submitted to the mining pool. The fish pool settles at 8 o'clock every day and displays the previous day's income at 12 o'clock.
Running other programs
Here we take 1to as an example, which is also the operation method of the mining pool
Download 1to program
https://github.com/1to-team/1to-miner/releases
Select this file to download, miner-ubuntu-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Modify permissions
chmod +777 miner-ubuntu-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Run the program
./miner-ubuntu-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --address aleo15pymtj9yhu9memz7gf385sccqqg9yrnva0ceaymlrmy6yhrpdg8sum765q --ws wss://pool.aleo1.to:33443/
Replace the aleo wallet address after address with your own. If you want to generate an aleo address, you can use the leo wallet plugin wallet
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/leo-wallet/nebnhfamliijlghikdgcigoebonmoibm
You can check the mining power and information of the address on the 1to page
https://aleo1.to/
It is not difficult to shut down the mining program. You can use the top command to query the process number of the mining program (a string of numbers), and then use the kill command to kill it. In this way, the CPU usage will drop to the normal proportion, indicating that the mining program has been shut down.
kill process number
Summarize
Currently, aleo mining is still in the early stages of incentives, and the mining program still needs to be continuously optimized by community ecosystem developers. Therefore, GPU mining may become the mainstream in the future. If you want to mine, you can consider purchasing high-end CPU products. The GPU you install can choose 30 series or 40 series graphics cards as needed.
At the same time, Aleo's incentive test activities are already very competitive. It is estimated that there may not be much profit like IONET. Therefore, participants should not have too high expectations. However, the mining income will generally cover the cost and earn a certain profit for the participants. I personally guess that it may be about 1 times the income of mining other projects with existing graphics cards. Users with graphics cards or high-end computers may be worth participating.