Preface
In the cryptocurrency market, 2024 is predicted by many market experts as a key year to usher in a new round of bull market. Behind this prediction, there are many factors that may promote the bull market. Among them, the next Bitcoin (BTC) halving event and the launch of BTC spot ETF in 2024 are regarded as key catalysts. Such a prospect will undoubtedly attract a large number of new investors to enter this field and seek investment opportunities.
Among many cryptocurrency projects, Aleo has attracted much attention for its unique Layer 1 privacy public chain technology. As a leader in the zero-knowledge proof track, Aleo has attracted the attention of many capitals around the world. For the cryptocurrency field, the emergence of Aleo has undoubtedly injected new vitality into the market and become an indispensable part. The wealth-making effect of blockchain has made traditional finance ready to take action. Friends who want to participate in Aleo mining, please add WeChat at the end of the article.
Many exchanges have launched Aleo futures and Heyue, and the highest over-the-counter price has reached nearly $3,000. This project has a high degree of consensus and has the potential of hundreds of thousands of times. It is planned to be launched on 30 leading exchanges in the first quarter of 2024, and the opening price will be very amazing! As Mr. Bao said, "When the bull market comes, you must have coins." So now many institutions and individuals have begun to compete to enter the market, and the FOMO sentiment in the Aleo market is high.
Aleo overview
Project name: Aleo
Track: ZK-based privacy public chain
Initial supply: 1.5 billion
Total network volume in 10 years: estimated to be 2.6 billion
Online time: Q1, 2024
Expected to be listed on: 5 major exchanges, 30 leading exchanges
web：https://ALEO.org/
X：https://twitter.com/ALEOHQ
DC：https://discord.gg/ALEOhq
GitHub：https://github.com/ALEOHQ
Blog：https://www.ALEO.org/blog
The well-known Bitcoin and Ethereum fall into the third and fourth quadrants respectively, and neither of them has privacy. Although Ethereum has a certain degree of programmability, it does not show any stronger advantages than Bitcoin. Looking back on the past, single-function privacy products in the second quadrant were once a hot spot in the market. As a typical representative in this field, ZCash is widely used in anonymous transfers. With innovative zero-knowledge proof technology, ZCash successfully combines privacy with transfer capabilities. However, ZCash is limited by its inability to combine privacy with broader programmability. Therefore, it is foreseeable that the next opportunities and hot spots in the market will focus on projects that can perfectly combine privacy and programmability.
Aleo belongs to the first quadrant. Aleo is the first public chain project to use zero-knowledge proof to solve privacy issues while ensuring programmability. Specifically, Aleo protects user privacy through zero-knowledge proof technology, including hiding interaction details such as participants, amounts, time, and smart contracts. At the same time, Aleo also gives users the right to choose. Users can choose to exit the privacy mode, ensuring that they have final control over their own information and decide what information to disclose or hide. In addition, Aleo utilizes zero-knowledge cryptography to move smart contract execution off-chain to support various Dapps and ensure its scalability (thousands of transactions per second).
Compared with other public chains, Aleo is unique in its strong privacy protection and on-chain scalability. Currently, smart contracts have two major limitations on the blockchain: one is a completely open and transparent design, which makes it impossible to protect privacy; the other is that it cannot scale to millions or even billions of users and cannot support large-scale Real-time online applications, such as real-time online games or activities with hundreds of millions of users. In order to solve these problems, the Aleo network uses zero-knowledge proof encryption technology to not only achieve privacy protection, but also be able to handle massive data and achieve scalability. This solves the current problem of Internet data leakage and makes up for the lack of openness and transparency of blockchain data information. Aleo can process massive amounts of data in real time and provide rich scalability, which is comparable to current Internet platforms. This is a major competitive advantage of the Aleo project in the market.
As the first decentralized full-stack development platform for privacy applications, Aleo is also one of the few large-scale zero-knowledge native blockchains. Aleo uses zero-knowledge proofs to solve issues such as privacy and confidentiality in blockchains. , enabling private and secure transactions, data sharing and computing. It pioneered blockchain privacy protection and provided practical solutions to privacy issues related to traditional blockchains. Aleo has a strong team background, superior financial reserves and institutional support, as well as the ability to attract developers and users to join the new ecosystem. It has the potential to become a leader in the web 3.0 privacy vertical field.
Information leakage and data privacy issues are frequent phenomena seen on the current Internet. Aleo's vision is to solve this problem while building a truly personal and private online user experience. Aleo is a strong advocate for privacy technologies in the blockchain ecosystem and provides a service platform that embodies privacy technologies in web applications to increase digital freedom and access around the world. Aleo CEO Alex Pruden said: Providing secure and scalable applications to the world.
The Aleo team believes that in the next decade, web services will be ubiquitous. They will no longer be limited to browsers, but will exist in more places and perform intelligent calculations on every intimate detail of people's lives. People's personal lives have become a "public good", and no matter where they live, they become more personalized with the development of network services. Therefore, the relationship between people and their own data and how people manage their own data are issues that everyone should think about in the future.
said Aleo co-founder Howard Wu. “Aleo will reshape the role decentralized systems play in our society and introduce a new paradigm to the way we live our digital lives. Privacy will no longer be just a feature, but will become a core functionality. To shape the future, Aleo is Leveraging two of the most advanced technologies (blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs) and leveraging innovation from each to deliver a full-stack solution that allows anyone to build web applications by default. We are excited to acquire the visionary Support from investors who have realized that privacy will play an important role in the next decade."
Aleo team background
The team behind ALEO is a group of experienced professionals with diverse backgrounds in cryptography, blockchain technology, and software development. The project is led by a group of individuals who have worked on high-profile projects in the industry, ensuring ALEO is built on experience and expertise. The team’s commitment to transparency and technical excellence is the driving force behind ALEO’s development.
The Aleo team consists of world-class cryptographers, engineers, designers, and operators from companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, as well as research universities like UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Cornell. At present, the entire team has more than 30 people, including financial and legal professionals. There are more than 40 code contributors, including experts and scholars in the field of cryptography. To judge the quality of a project, the number of code contributors is the most important factor. .
Aleo was officially founded in 2019 by current CTO Howard Wu. He co-authored a basic paper "Zexe: Implementing Decentralized Private Computing" that applied ZK to web3. The other co-founders are Michael Beller, CollinChin and Raymond Chu. The current CEO of Aleo is former a16z partner Alex Pruden, which indirectly promoted A16Z to lead a US$28 million investment in Aleo in April 2021. Of course, the reasons why they founded Aleo or joined Aleo stem from the stories and missions behind them. Understanding them helps to understand the original intention and great vision of Aleo as a new Internet tool or application.
Howard Wu
Howard Wu is the co-founder of Aleo Systems, a managing partner of Dekrypt Capital, and an advisor to the Berkeley Blockchain Research Center. Howard Wu graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked as a software engineer at Google. He is a senior expert (OG) in the field of zero-knowledge proof cryptography, and his related scientific research results have also attracted much attention.
MichaelBeller
Michael Beller is the CEO of Aleo and a former trading partner of a16z Crypto. He has worked in various VC and financial industries. He is a former U.S. Army infantryman and special operations officer with a strong passion for applied cryptography and blockchain technology. He studied for an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business and hopes to create a more secure, transparent, and equitable future for the next generation.
Raymond Chu
Raymond Chu is the co-founder of Aleo and a security consultant at Argus. Raymond Chu graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked at Amazon and IBM.
Collin C.
Collin C. is the co-founder of Aleo and attended the University of California, Berkeley, from 2015 to 2018, studying electrical engineering and computer science. CollinChin once worked at ConsenSys&GnosisDAO and is currently mainly responsible for developing the programming language of the Aleo public chain - LEO. With over 6 years of experience, Collin began his career as a Robotics and Programming Instructor at SySTEMic Solutions. In 2016, he became a software QA intern at Sportvision and served as a technical consultant for Berkeley Blockchain. In 2017, he held several positions, including security consultant at Argus Observer LLC, development advocate at Gnosis, and smart contract development intern at ConsenSys. In 2020, he became the co-founder of Aleo Systems Inc.
More Aleo core team members:
Howard Wu (Founder)
He has many years of experience in the field of Data-as-a-Service and is good at blockchain and privacy protection.
Alex Pruden (CEO)
One of the partners of A16Z has worked at Coinbase.
Joseph Poon (Technical Advisor)
Co-founder of the Lightning Network, a pioneer in faster and cheaper transactions, specializing in distributed systems and cryptography.
Evan Shapiro (Chief Technology Officer)
He was the technical director of O(1) Labs and was proficient in zero-knowledge proof technology and blockchain technology.
Ali Yahya (Managing Director)
Co-founder of Harbor Technology Startup with extensive experience in start-ups and private equity investments.
Jacqueline Jing Lin (Community Manager)
He has extensive community management experience and has served as the manager of Cryptocurrency Cabal, Zcash and other communities.
Aleo financing scale
The Aleo project has been favored by well-known venture capital institutions such as SoftBank Vision Fund, Samsung, Coinbase Ventures, a16z, Polychain Capital, Galaxy Digital, Kora Management, etc., and has successfully attracted a large amount of investment. This fact fully demonstrates that investors have high confidence in the future development potential of the project. After three rounds of financing, the Aleo project has raised US$298 million, setting a record for financing in the field of zero-knowledge proof.
Currently, Aleo’s officially announced financing includes Series A, Series B and Series B+. The Series A financing amount is US$28 million, the Series B financing amount is US$200 million, and the B+ financing amount is US$70 million. The total financing amount is US$298 million, with a market valuation of US$1.45 billion.
The Series A financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in April 2021, and institutions such as PlaceholderVC, Galaxy Digital, VariantCapital and Coinbase Ventures participated in the investment. Other investors include Polychain Capital, Slow Ventures, Dekrypt Capital, Scalar Capital, a_capital, zkValidator, Balaji Srinivasan and Ethereal Ventures, a new venture fund founded by Joseph Lubin.
Series B financing was led by Kora Management LP and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in February 2022, with participation from Tiger Global and Sea Capital, Samsung Next, Slow Ventures and a16z, raising a total of US$200 million. This is the largest round of financing in the history of zero-knowledge proof.
In August 2022, it received another US$70 million in Series B+ financing from Softbank Vision Fund 2 and Samsung Next. Aleo has now entered the public eye and attracted the attention of many technical practitioners in the encryption field, capital institutions, and traditional server manufacturers.
Why is Aleo favored by investment institutional giants such as A16Z and Google and SoftBank? It is undoubtedly a hot creation of the current privacy track. In addition, Aleo investors also include Kora Management LP, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, etc. They are also investors in Dingdong Maicai, Chengxin Selection, and Keep. People’s lives are inseparable from these apps. In the investment field, they are definitely "unicorn"-like existences.
Summary: For most investors, among the three "technology, capital, and market", capital has the greatest weight. Because the traders behind the capital are all professional teams, they are very strict in risk control and project auditing. It can be seen that the capital behind Aleo are all top investment institutions in the circle, with strong strength and large financing amount. Large enough to support the long-term research and development and operation of the project.
A16Z official website’s announcement on ALEO investment information
https://a16z.com/2021/04/20/investing-in-aleo/
A16Z investment list includes ALEO
https://a16z.com/investments/
SoftBank official website enters Vision Fund Phase 2 official website
https://group.softbank/en
Vision Fund Phase 2 official website
https://visionfund.com/portfolio
Samsung NEXT official website
https://www.samsungnext.com/blog/y-we-invested-in-aleo-the-platform-for-building-private-blockchain-applications
The above investment information is all true and can be verified. You can click on the link to verify it yourself. It is worth mentioning that when reading A16z’s investment Memo on Aleo, it was mentioned that Aleo may be one of the teams with the strongest execution ability that A16z has ever seen.
In the nearly blank field of encryption + ZKP, they not only completed the construction of the test network in a short period of time, but also created their own programming language Leo, as well as the corresponding development framework and environment Aleo Studio. Founder Howard Wu submitted 32 commits in the Github code base in a certain month, indicating the core team's extreme diligence in development engineering.
Aleo Advantages and Prospects
Summary of Aleo advantages:
Privacy, security, scalability, high performance, ease of use, and editability are the six major advantages of Aleo.
Analysis of Aleo highlights:
Own technology: Breaking the impossible triangle of blockchain, taking into account efficiency, programmability and privacy, it is equivalent to the combination of L2+ETH+ZEC. Its privacy computing attributes and large data set computing capabilities push the entire web3.0 forward. A big step;
Capital enters the game: Wherever the future trend is, capital money will definitely be directed there! At present, Aleo has received US$298 million in financing from internationally renowned giants such as A16z, coinbase, Tiger Global Fund, South Korea’s Samsung, and Japan’s SoftBank;
Opportunities for the vacancy in the GPU (graphics card) market: Starting from December 1, 2022, ETH mining will shift from PoW to PoS, marking a vacancy in the GPU market. The emergence of Aleo is to replace the second position in the ETH mining world;
Economic model: Aleo uses PoW physical machines + PoS on-chain staking, where PoW provides computing power for off-chain distributed computing and does not explode blocks, so it does not constitute mining logic and fundamentally eliminates the risk of mining;
Controllable costs: In zkCloud, the running program is performed off-chain, and the points spent on the Aleo network can be calculated in advance. There is no unpredictable cost caused by Gas;
Early first mine: The Aleo mainnet launch time is scheduled for Q1 of 2024. The market expects it to be online in January. Before then, it is an excellent stage of preparation for the first mine. Throughout history, there is no precedent for top mining participants to lose money, and they basically recover their capital within 1-2 months;
Global consensus: Those currently participating in the layout of Aleo include sparkpool, the world's largest Ethereum mining pool, which owns more than 50% of the world's Ethereum computing power. It also includes Bitmain, Hong Kong Moore, Russia's 1to, and many established IPFS companies. Aleo was laid out;
Opportunities for bull and bear alternation time points: There are less than 4 months until the BTC halving, which means that the bull market will come soon, leaving little time for everyone to make plans.
Benefits for Aleo users:
Using Aleo, users can enter a truly personalized world of web services, where they can not only recover data from large companies and platforms, but also manage their own data independently.
High level of privacy protection: Privacy protection has always been a challenge for traditional enterprises when processing and storing large amounts of sensitive data. Aleo’s privacy protocol zk-SNARKs can ensure efficient computing and data processing while protecting data privacy, which is very attractive for enterprises that need to protect sensitive information of customers and enterprises.
Security: Aleo ensures network security and stability through node verification and processing of transactions.
Decentralization: Traditional enterprises usually use centralized systems and methods for data processing and storage, while Aleo adopts a decentralized system architecture to ensure a more fair and transparent data processing process and avoid possible single points of failure.
Investment opportunities: Aleo tokens can be used for investment and financing projects, such as the development and promotion of decentralized applications (dApps), providing enterprises with new financial tools to help finance, develop and promote projects more effectively.
Summary: Aleo provides customers with new solutions, including privacy protection, data processing, security, and capital flow, which are very attractive and advantageous.
Aleo extensive use cases:
Data privacy protection: Aleo can be used to build decentralized applications and contracts, ensuring that user data and privacy are completely protected.
Copyright protection: Aleo can be used to build decentralized copyright protection applications and contracts to ensure that the intellectual property rights of artists and creators are protected.
Supply chain management: Aleo can be used to build decentralized supply chain management applications and contracts to ensure that the origin of products and the circular economy are tracked and managed.
Healthcare: Aleo can be used to build decentralized healthcare applications and contracts, ensuring that medical data and other sensitive data are protected, and ensuring data correctness and integrity.
Asset Management: Aleo can be used to build decentralized asset management applications and contracts, ensuring that digital assets and other assets are protected, and ensuring transaction security and legal compliance.
Financial services: Aleo can be used to build decentralized financial service applications and contracts, ensuring the transparency and security of transactions, and ensuring that data and privacy are protected.
Social Media: Aleo can be used to build decentralized social media applications and contracts, ensuring that users’ data and privacy are protected, and that content is decentralized and widely disseminated.
Aleo prospect analysis: To analyze the industry in which the Aleo project is located, you can start from the zero-knowledge proof field and Layer1.
In the field of zero-knowledge proof, with the accelerated research and development of hardware and the improvement of infrastructure, ZK technology will become more practical and form a close connection with it in multiple fields, such as the Metaverse, Web3, cryptocurrency, finance and privacy, etc. . The development of zero-knowledge (ZK) is still in its early stages. As an encryption algorithm, it stands out among a series of encryption algorithms and is inseparable from its excellent algorithm characteristics and ease of use.
ZK technology is applied in the blockchain field, which means faster-running blockchain networks and open, private applications. To some extent, it has also become the core and supporting tool of the blockchain ecosystem. While achieving privacy guarantees, it can also achieve scalability, which are crucial to the future development of blockchain and even web3. This is the future application prospect of zero-knowledge proof and the prospect of the Aleo network.
In terms of Layer1, unlike Layer2 projects such as Starware, zkSync, and Scroll, the Aleo network has its own snarkVM, Leo programming language, Aleo Studio development environment, PoSW consensus mechanism, etc., which means that in the zero-knowledge field, applications and ecosystems developed based on Aleo All greatly exceed the Layer2 ZK project, and the massive market and considerable capital brought by the application ecosystem and system are beyond imagination.
The Aleo project has gained the favor of capital by using zero-knowledge proof technology. Therefore, it can be said that opportunities in the field of zero-knowledge proofs are also opportunities for the Aleo project, especially for blockchain Layer 1.
From the perspective of blockchain Layer 1, unlike Layer 2, Layer 1 has its own smart contracts, development environment, programming language, consensus mechanism, economic model, etc. It can attract more potential market ecology in terms of scale and volume, and gain more benefits. users and value. This is the opportunity and advantage of the Aleo project to be positioned at Layer 1.
Aleo economic model
Aleo initial supply: 1.5 billion
8% allocated to strategic partners
15% allocated to team members and project contributors
17% allocated to Aleo Corporation and Aleo Foundation
25% allocated to various service providers
35% allocated to early backers
Note that the current description of the economic model is still "approximately" (translated to mean approximately, approximately, possible), which means that although this is an official channel, there are still variables before the main network is officially launched.
The distribution of points may change over time in two ways: natural and algorithmic.
Some contributors may sell their tokens to pay fees, meaning distribution will naturally shift away from the original holders. Algorithmically, distribution will change significantly as “staking” and “proof” rewards will increase the circulating supply of tokens.
This means that within 10 years, more than 50% of Aleo Tokens will be distributed to the public. As a result, the community of early supporters will become increasingly decentralized over time.
Since the lock-up release plan of 1.5 billion has not yet been announced, the total release volume in the first year is not expected to be very low, regardless of whether it is based on the conventional "1+3" or "2+2" model. Therefore, it is currently speculated that given the huge total supply, the price of Token is not expected to be too high. However, due to the increase in supply, the Token is very likely to enter the top 20 or even the top 10 in market capitalization, because even if the price is moderate, its market capitalization will be considerable.
Token usage:
Aleo Tokens play a key role in creating a mutually beneficial ecosystem by allowing users and developers to gain access to verification and data services on the network while compensating providers for the work of securing the network:
Granting access: Tokens are used to access block space and computing resources on the network, and users pay tokens to submit transactions and have them processed.
Create incentives: Provers and verifiers receive Aleo Tokens through the protocol as rewards for protecting the network, motivating a strong decentralized network.
Enable staking: Tokens can be staked with validators to generate blocks and provide network security, and stakers will receive a corresponding proportion of network rewards.
Driven governance: After the mainnet is launched, Aleo Token holders can participate in decentralized governance, vote for upgrades and change the protocol.
pledger
Stakeholders are people or organizations who lock their tokens for a period of time to make the Aleo network more secure. They can lock at least one AleoToken to help secure the network, but they will not start receiving staking rewards until they have locked at least 10 Tokens. Just like stakers on other decentralized networks, they will delegate part of their AleoTokens to validators so that they can contribute corresponding weight to participate in the consensus. Then, they will receive a corresponding proportion of AleoTokens based on the number of pledged Tokens.
prover
Sometimes called ZK miners or ZK provers, they are a special zero-knowledge specific infrastructure on the Aleo network. They use specialized GPUs and CPUs to compete against each other to contribute to Aleo by solving the PoSW (Proof-of-Simple Work) Coinbase puzzle. The better the prover is at solving the Aleo Coinbase puzzle, the greater their chance of receiving the Aleo Coinbase reward. Many provers will receive a portion of the Coinbase reward in proportion to the number of valid puzzle solutions they submit.
validator
Validators must own at least 1 million AleoTokens. Validators are infrastructure service providers that secure the network through AleoBFT. AleoBFT is a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that utilizes recent research results Bullshark and its Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) Narwhal-Style memory pool for optimization. Users can package and upload off-chain information into less data, so the network required to participate is greatly reduced (sometimes called "gas" fees). By doing so, they still get the solid security of a proof-of-stake model but reduce the amount of sensitive data shared by packaging it into zero-knowledge proofs. Validators will use SnarkOS software to verify and confirm transaction blocks, and participate in Aleo's consensus mechanism to reach a consistent state. They can include proofs from provers when creating blocks and receive rewards and fees for securing the network.
Aleo Price Prediction
This is just a conservative prediction, and the actual value may be different from the current prediction.
Using the simplest prediction method: According to Aleo’s B and B+ round financing costs of about 0.45-1.5U, it is expected that there will be about 60 million unpledged coins in the hands of VCs in the first year. Aleo’s total financing is approximately US$298 million. Assuming that the VC’s first-year shipping target is to recover capital, the bulk shipment price of approximately 60 million unpledged coins should be no less than US$5, so the price needs to be gradually increased to Above $10 to more safely control the market. Therefore, the price after the Aleo mainnet is launched is estimated to be between US$13-16.
Please note that this is for reference only! However, the non-small size shows that 50U has increased by more than 6 times. I believe it will perform even better after it goes online.
Aleo head mine participation
115 Bitcoins were mined on the first day, which is about 55 million based on the bull market price. There were 7,200 Ethereum on the first day, which is more than 120 million based on the current price. The amount produced by the Aleo mine in the first two months may take two years to dig out. At present, Aleo's first-level quota has been sold out, so it is recommended that friends who can catch up with Aleo's first mine participate in the layout as soon as possible. Don't hesitate, hesitation can easily make a mistake.
If you want to participate in the first batch of Aleo mining opportunities, the only feasible way at present is to purchase an Aleo server. Every first mine in history is the most powerful. By planning in advance, you can participate in the first mine in the first time and get more Aleo.