By building a default private L1, Aleo is betting there’s enough demand from developers that they’re willing to pay higher costs to build privacy into their applications until they can lower costs. The team is working to increase demand by “commoditizing its complement,” specifically optimized hardware to solve zero-knowledge proofs quickly and cheaply.
ZKP is very complex to understand on a technical level, but easy to understand on a practical level. They mean faster blockchains and open and private applications. As a testament to their flexibility, zero-knowledge proofs are used as a solution for both too little transparency (i.e. FTX → Proof of Solvency) and too much transparency (i.e. without them, everyone knows your complete on-chain balance and transaction history) plan.
Zero-knowledge proofs will play an important role in the future of encryption, and possibly the future of the internet. They’re really hard to figure out, but now that they exist, they offer solutions that are strictly better than the alternatives. Exactly how they are implemented remains open to debate.
One approach is to build zkRollups on top of existing L1 blockchains such as Ethereum. Leading companies like Matter Labs ( zkSync ), Starkware , and Aztec are taking this approach.
Another approach is to start from scratch, build a new L1, and incorporate scaling and privacy at the base layer. That’s what Alio is doing.
Aleo was originally conceived as an L2 on Ethereum, but ZKPs on Ethereum are more powerful — they must consume the full state of the application — and Ethereum does not support SNARK-friendly primitives — hash functions and elliptic curves — — So the team rewrote the plan and decided to build their own L1 to provide cheaper ZKP.
Aleo is taking the most radical approach possible by building a zero-knowledge based blockchain from the ground up. Rather than building an EVM-compatible chain on which developers can build applications in the familiar Solidity programming language, it created its own virtual machine, snarkVM, and the programming language Leo . It does not rely on existing consensus mechanisms such as Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS), but uses a combination of the two with a useful tweak to PoW called concise Proof of Work . The result should be that ZKB on Aleo is much cheaper than on Ethereum.
The bet it makes is that developers will be willing to learn new tricks to gain scaling and privacy superpowers.
This is a bet that requires you to believe that ZKPs are not only a nice feature, but that they are the foundation for a third way of building blockchains:
- Wave 1 : Bitcoin
- Wave 2 : Ethereum
- Wave 3 : Aleo
A great way to understand why Aleo makes the bets they do, and the details and implications of zero-knowledge proof technology. Discussing Zero Knowledge, Aleo, and the Future of the Internet
Zero knowledge review
Zero-knowledge proof is a fancy type of cryptography that allows one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that it knows something without revealing any information about that thing. They make someone prove they know a secret without giving up any information about the secret.
Instead of our color-blind friend and two balls, we can use a “three-color puzzle”. The goal is to color the nodes on this graph with three different colors so that no adjacent nodes have the same color.
like this:
Now let’s talk about ZKP. The prover (the one doing the 3 colorings) places the bowl on top of each node while the verifier leaves the room.
The validator goes back into the room and picks an edge, any edge. Proverbs needs to pick up the two bowls on top of the edge nodes.
So far, so good. Two adjacent balls have different colors. Now we repeat this process over and over again, with the verifier exiting and the prover rearranging the balls each time. Imagine doing this millions of times (the prover and verifier are moving very fast) and each time, the verifier picks an edge and holds up the bowl, and voila: two different colors.
This game reveals two key properties of zero-knowledge proofs:
- Soundness : If the prover cheats, the verifier should be able to catch them. If the prover doesn’t really know the 3-color solution, then in at least one round the verifier will pick an edge and find two balls of the same color.
- Zero-knowledge : The verifier should not know anything about the three-color, complete puzzle, which we achieved by running the game millions of times. Mina said, “Anything the validator might learn in one round won’t matter in subsequent rounds because whatever the validator sees can be simulated by randomly picking two differently colored balls in each round. .”
When you actually run ZKP, there aren’t very few people running around putting the ball behind their back or putting the bowl on the ball, it all happens with complex math, elliptic curves, circuits, and specialized hardware, these little games Very useful for helping understand ZKP to get the concepts , although it takes years of study to understand them enough to create your own.
Regardless, zero-knowledge proofs allow you to do a lot of really useful things on the blockchain or in your daily life. They are an encryption technology that can be applied outside of encryption .
