On June 18th, an AMA session with the ALEO team took place. You can access the full version of the AMA session on our YouTube channel via the link provided. Below, we publish a summarized translation of the most important questions discussed at this meeting.

Q1. How was the idea to create the Aleo project born?

A1. Howard Wu:
A few years ago, I and a group of researchers were assessing the crypto landscape in two directions: programmability and security. We came to the obvious conclusion that Bitcoin does not fit either of these criteria. Ethereum extends Bitcoin in one direction — programmability (smart contracts). ZCash, on the other hand, improves Bitcoin’s technology towards privacy. However, the top-right quadrant — simultaneous programmability and privacy — remains unoccupied. We decided to fill this niche. Thus, the Aleo project was born. It started as the research project Zexe (https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/962.pdf), which stands for ZeroKnowledge execution. We published a whitepaper about two years ago. The document generated significant interest in the crypto community. This technology can be used to create private wallets, protected economic programs, private markets, decentralized exchanges, etc. This marked the beginning of the Aleo project.

Q2. What experience do the project team members have?

A2. Howard Wu:
I’ve been in crypto for 10 years. I started with CPU and GPU mining. Then I began studying altcoins. The entire core team worked in laboratories at leading US universities. We participated in Ethereum and ZCash projects. We met in the crypto world, so we have quite extensive experience in crypto.

Q3. Who are the investors in the project? What kind of support do they provide?

A3. Howard Wu:
About two months ago, there was a significant influx of investments, led by A16Z Horowitz. Other partners include Polychain, Placeholder, Galaxy, Variant, Coinbase Ventures, and others. The main point of all this is that the funds help not only with resources but also in expanding our presence. They assist in establishing initial contacts, finding the right people, starting mining in networks, and so forth.

Q4. What are the main advantages offered by Aleo? What sets you apart from competitors?

A4. Howard Wu:
First — scalability. If we take the NFT market, there are many teams offering to issue 10 NFTs valued at a million dollars each, but no one can offer a million NFTs at 10 dollars each. Aleo can offer such a solution.
The second is a wide range of offerings from fully public to completely private. For example, take well-known games like Battleship and Chess. Chess can easily be written on Ethereum — the board must be visible to both participants. With Battleship, it’s the opposite — the opponent should not see your board. This makes it impossible to launch Battleship on Ethereum or any other L1 blockchains. Here arises the need for private applications using zk-proofs, and Aleo offers a solution to this problem. Aleo is also working on creating an SDK so that anyone can write an application without being a professor in cryptography.

Q5. Why did you decide to create your own language, Leo? It resembles a mix of Rust and JS. What do these languages lack?

A5. Howard Wu:
Firstly, we didn’t make a language that would be compiled into a binary and executed on a CPU. We needed a simpler way to write a program that would compile into so-called circuits that run on a zero-knowledge proofs ecosystem. There are different approaches to this, but none of those we studied were ready for production. They lacked unit tests. Also, in existing solutions, there is no possibility to share code. Therefore, we are implementing our language, it has a package-manager, IDE, the ability to share your code, it compiles in a zero-knowledge proof system, supports the ecosystem, has states, state transitions, zk-DSL. More about this is described in the article on eprint, you can Google eprint Leo paper and read more about the basics of this language.

Q6. How exactly do you plan to ensure privacy for applications in your ecosystem?

A6. Howard Wu:
Applications live entirely in encrypted form on the blockchain, but developers can choose a particular setting — whether to publish the code in a closed or open form. Thus, you can publish applications that are completely private with closed code or completely public. The technology allows verifying the correctness of the encryption key without knowing it. Thus, you can trust this proof and work with this blockchain and applications on this chain. The short answer to all this is — zero-knowledge proofs. It’s worth reading about zk-proofs, and it will become a little clearer.

Q7. Tell us about the project’s roadmap

A7. Anthony DiPrinzio:
The main thing is that the roadmap is constantly changing. At the moment, the high-level picture looks like this.
First quarter of 2022 launch of Aleo mainnet. Real mining with real tokens, not like in the testnet we are doing now.
Second quarter of 2021:

1. Launch of a grant program — almost ready. Send your applications. Links can be found in Discord. Applications are reviewed weekly.
2. Launch of three setup ceremonies. July 1 and August 1 desktop ceremonies. A third ceremony in a month. We hope for active community participation in these ceremonies. We will explain more about this later.
   Third quarter of 2021: We hope to launch token transfers, a wallet called Wagger, and finish tokenomics.
   Fourth quarter of 2021: Launch of SDK and Leo language. Launch of the final Testnet. Around this time, we are thinking about launching a bug bounty program. There is no specific information about rewards in the testnet yet, but we are working on it.

Q8. Are there any non-technical activities planned? For example, community or marketing competitions.

A8. Anthony DiPrinzio:
This is what we are thinking about now. But at the moment, the main opportunity is mining in the test network. This is a great opportunity to prepare for the mainnet and earn Aleo Credits. We will also have a programming contest, which will help to learn the language and Zero-proof cryptography, as well as catch bugs in our programming language. Additionally, we are thinking about an ambassador program, which will help to introduce our project to a wider audience.
Sam Parker:
We will definitely reward early adopters. We don’t know how yet, but it’s in the plans. Being an early adopter is very profitable. You can mine tokens even on a home PC.

Q9. How do you plan to conduct the setup ceremony? And what is the difference between your ceremony and, for example, ZCash?

A9. Sam Parker:
We will use the Powers of Tau system, for example, it was used in Tornado Cash. What is a setup ceremony? In a nutshell, it’s the process of confirmed creation and destruction of an encryption key. This is a big task for private blockchains and applications. In ZCash, there were 6 or 9 people in the setup ceremony, for it to be successful ⅓ of the participants had to be honest. In Powers of Tau, thousands of people can participate worldwide. And for its success, only one honest participant is enough, who will destroy the key and launch the system. This radically distinguishes this mechanism from the mechanism used in ZCash. The ceremony will be open to all participants of Telegram and Discord, everyone can join and participate in it. I remind you that it will take place in three stages — July 1, August 1, and September 1. And for the first two, serious hardware will be needed. And the third stage on September 1 will be browser-based. Everyone can participate in it. Follow the announcements in Discord. And of course, we will pin the news in Telegram as soon as they appear.

Q10. What is the difference between a node and a miner in the Aleo network? What a miner is is clear. But what is the purpose of a node?

A10. Sam Parker:
A node, if we are talking about a full node, performs the same functions as in Bitcoin, as in any other proof of work network. It is a full copy of the entire network. And it is the most reliable source of data about the network, about transactions. If you want to launch an application, of course, you need to launch a full node. There is also a light node, which does not contain all transactions. It stores only block headers, network height. If you want to receive rewards, then you need to run a miner. There are no other differences. That is the same as in any proof of work consensus.

Q11. Miners will receive Aleo Credits for blocks mined. If a person does not want to launch infrastructure or applications, is there a point in running a node? Is there a reward in the future or mainnet?

A11. Anthony DiPrinzio:
As a miner, you can mine blocks and receive Aleo credits or produce proofs (evidence) for users and receive Aleo credits or other cryptocurrency. We call this proofs-as-a-service (proof as a service). The profit from creating proofs for a user compared to generating PoSW should be about the same. The price of proofs does not depend on the blockchain. Users can set the price. With proofs-as-a-service instead of sending the transaction yourself, you can send it to a miner. As a miner, you decide to mine or produce proofs. In Bitcoin, there’s the grind of SHA-256, whereas in our system, the same happens with SNARKs. If you want, you can use your private key to generate a separate key, which will then be used by miners for proofs. This is another way to earn Aleo Credits. Currently, these are the two main methods to acquire Aleo Credits. It’s possible that more ways will emerge in the future.
Sergio: "Do I understand correctly that you will have snark-workers?"
Anthony DiPrinzio: "Yes, that’s a good way to put it."

Q12. Do you plan to have a public sale or ICO?

A12. Anthony DiPrinzio:
At this time, the team is not planning to conduct an ICO or any other type of public sale. However, we are planning to distribute rewards among the testnet participants and setup ceremony participants. The specifics are not clear yet. It might be done through Coinlist. More information will be available once we have worked out the Aleo Credits tokenomics, which is expected by the end of this year. We are considering using NFT tokens to identify participants of the third setup ceremony in September. These are not rewards, but a way to identify those who participated. So, keep participating, mining, following the grants for developers, and developing applications.

Q13. What are the minimum system requirements for a miner?

A13. Anthony DiPrinzio:
At the moment, there are no exact figures. We are researching this issue. In the testnet, there are currently nodes with a configuration of 6 CPU and 16 RAM on a 100GB SSD. At the moment, they are managing well. If you are building programs, everything directly depends on what programs you are executing. Because depending on the complexity and size of the system, depending on your Circuits, you may have completely different hardware requirements. The requirements for the mainnet are not yet determined.

Q14. Do you expect legal complications with private applications? Such applications are not welcomed by the government. What if someone commits illegal actions using the Aleo network and private applications?

A14. Anthony DiPrinzio:
We recently hired a lawyer to help us address this issue. In general, in our network, in private applications, the end user can choose how much their transaction is not private, public.

Q15. What partnerships with L1/L2 blockchains are planned?

A15. Anthony DiPrinzio:
We are currently working on partnerships with other blockchains. I can’t mention their names yet. We are thinking about setting up bridges with other L1 blockchains. If another project has DeFi applications, we can provide them with additional security. Or implement crypto derivatives. At the moment, of course, this is very difficult to do on the blockchain. If anyone in the audience has connections with representatives of other Layer1 chains, if you are already working on something, or have worked in another project, are well connected with a certain Layer1 blockchain, keep developing, apply for grants, write to us directly, you will definitely be noticed.

Q16. How can one check how many blocks a miner has produced?

A16. Anthony DiPrinzio:
This can be done through a block explorer. How to identify yourself in the explorer, I can’t advise. Please contact the Discord channel. (Spoiler — we added monitoring to the script on nodes.guru/aleo)

Q17. We have a monitoring script from Alex. It shows the miner’s status, block height, and other characteristics. But it does not show how much work on the network the miner has done. How can we get this information?

A17. Anthony DiPrinzio:
As far as I know, currently, there is no way. But we are constantly working on expanding the functionality. Let’s address this question in Discord.