“We completed the third phase of Testnet 3 in late 2023, and we discovered a number of issues through this process. We discovered this list of issues from six audits and two bug bounty programs,” said Alex, Executive Director of the Aleo Foundation Pruden said.
Pruden highlighted Aleo hardships in reaching this stage after the past four years, especially redesigning the network consensus algorithm after the second testnet, “ But the good news is that we have reached the final stage of this journey, and Aleo main The network is ready to launch at any time. ” he said.
Aleo origins can be traced to a 2018 academic paper written by several of Zcash’s founders and co-authors of the paper. The core idea is to extend Zcash’s private transactions into the smart contract realm. Pruden said that although some other teams tried to realize this idea, they ultimately failed. Howard Wu, one of the co-authors of the current paper and the founder and CTO of Aleo, finally reached this idea.
Pruden is a former partner at crypto venture firm a16z. In December 2023, Aleo company split into two parts, and Pruden became the CEO of the Aleo Foundation. This is a move that many crypto companies take ahead of a token launch, and Aleo is planning one.
The purpose of launching Aleo
Pruden said the motivation for launching Aleo is to introduce privacy protections in encryption, with the goal of unlocking use cases around crypto payments (such as paying wages) and identity privacy security solutions.
“While there are a lot of use cases cited — and I’ve been involved in the investment and operational side of things where people talk about things like digital identity — the reality is that there aren’t any real off-the-shelf applications that exist today,” he said. “The team’s core belief is that without truly achieving a level of privacy, the technology, Aleo, will not be practical or useful for anything other than a casino variant.”
To achieve this level of privacy, Aleo uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) at the core blockchain level to support transactions and smart contract interactions that are private by default. This means that sender and transaction information are hidden from other users. Of course, Aleo also allows users to automatically choose to disclose information about these transactions.
While privacy coins have faced some challenges — some exchanges have pulled them due to regulatory pressure — Pruden insists that projects like Aleo have a responsibility to clear the name of the technology. He noted that Aleo has some advantages, such as being able to prove that a crypto address is not on a blacklist before sending funds to it.
Pruden said his short-term goal is for Aleo to support apps that people use every day — apps that are tightly integrated into users’ daily activities. His long-term dream is for Aleo technology to be “integrated into broader network structures.”
The good and bad of privacy coins
As technologies like Signal have shown, focusing on privacy protection while also ensuring a good user experience can be a challenge.
One potential problem is that zero-knowledge proofs are difficult to generate. To solve this problem, any user of the Aleo network will calculate their own proof offline before making a transaction. This avoids committing the entire calculation to the chain, which would be prohibitively expensive on blockchains like Ethereum , Pruden said.
Although this is cheaper, it will be slower, currently taking less than a second to generate a simple transaction on a laptop, but on devices such as mobile phones it can take up to 20 seconds. However, Pruden also said that a few years ago, the generation of these proofs might have taken several months — now this field has achieved significant development speed, and Aleo will achieve a smoother proof generation speed in the future.
Pruden noted that there is an added benefit to using zero-knowledge proofs at the blockchain level. This enables Aleo to support Layer 2s rollups (one of the two main types of rollups) that rely on zero-knowledge proofs to prove that all transactions are authentic.
Aleo mainnet launch time
According to official news, the Aleo mainnet will be launched in about a month. Partners who want to participate in the Aleo project can make plans as soon as possible.
