Aleo was born from a desire to achieve the impossible — to build a user experience on the web that is both truly personal and truly private.
Aleo is the first platform to offer fully private applications.
By architecting Aleo as a blockchain that is private-by-default, open-source, and built for the web, we believe Aleo is uniquely positioned to address the shortcomings of blockchain adoption. With Aleo, users have access to a world of truly personalized web services without giving up control of their private data.
Blockchains are merely an idea for the majority of people. A limited percentage of technologists, activists, and investors “use” them. While most blockchains do not require permission, this does not mean that they are open to everyone, as the concepts and terminology present genuine limitations. This is commonly referred to as an onboarding issue. There’s a lot more to it than that.
For Aleo there are mainly three reason why blockchain is fundamental.
First, existing blockchains are inadequate for real-world applications.
Second, technologies should not be developed for their own sake.
Third, new technologies attract actors who complicate a technology’s value proposition.
Today, there is no such thing as private web data.
Someone else owns it if it’s available on the internet. The web’s business model is to offer free services in exchange for personal information. This approach is outdated, because it puts users against suppliers. The user is compelled to give up their data in exchange for desired services, at the expense of their personal privacy. The provider is responsible for managing user data in order to provide their service, and is responsible for the consequences of storing, processing, and reporting it. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it certainly shouldn’t be.
Users should not have to hand over their private data.
Instead, users should be able to run their data via the provider’s transparent algorithms. Users’ data should not be stored, processed, or reported by providers. Instead, they should be able to delegate their work to the user and only need to check the response. By offering services in this manner, neither the user nor the supplier knows more than they need to know, and the user retains control over personal data.
Aleo is built for the web.
Unlike other solutions that aim to replace it, Aleo is built to work alongside it. Aleo provides people with unique experiences that are both deeply personal and deeply private. Aleo also presents a programming model for developers that interfaces with existing online apps.
Aleo is the first decentralized, open-source platform to enable both private and programmable applications.
Aleo’s goal is to provide an end-to-end pipeline for developers to write, run, and deploy private applications seamlessly, using its complete set of tools for programmable zero knowledge, enumerated below:
1. Leo — To write private applications on Aleo intuitively and easily, we have developed a programming language called Leo. Leo looks and feels just like a traditional programming language. Yet under the hood, Leo is far more complex. Leo abstracts low-level cryptographic concepts and makes it easy to integrate private applications into your stack.
Leo introduces a high-level syntax that makes it easy to write and intuitive to express logic in zero knowledge. The Leo language was influenced by traditional programming languages like JavaScript, Scala, and Rust, with a strong emphasis on readability and ease-of-use. Under the hood, Leo converts a developer’s high-level code into zero knowledge circuits.
2. Aleo Studio — To jumpstart the development cycle, we have built Aleo Studio, the first IDE for writing zero knowledge applications. Aleo Studio is an interactive development environment for writing zero knowledge applications in Leo. For developers, Aleo Studio is designed to simplify the development cycle and make it easy to publish your Leo project as a package to the ecosystem.
3. Aleo Package Manager — To make it simple to bundle and share your work, we have built a package manager for Leo. Aleo Package Manager is the first package manager for zero knowledge circuits. It includes collaborative features like teams and organizations to make it easy to work with friends and colleagues on private applications. In addition, Aleo Package Manager is integrated with Aleo Studio, making it easy to import and publish new packages without having to leave the editor.
4. snarkOS — Aleo runs on a decentralized operating system for private applications called snarkOS. It forms the logical backbone for state transitions, and enables applications to verify and store state on the Aleo blockchain in a publicly verifiable manner. snarkOS enforces data availability guarantees on Aleo for all programs and transactions. Moreover, our consensus mechanism ensures verifiers compute zero knowledge proofs to checkpoint state on-chain.
In short Aleo’s goal is to create a decentralized, open-source network that will offer robust support for building, deploying, and running private applications on the web. We believe that the open, decentralized nature of this foundation will provide a far stronger incentive to participate. And just like Bitcoin’s economic model was critical to it’s success, a stable token economy with predictable prices provides the perfect underpinning to enable the next generation of computing based on zero-knowledge cryptography.
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