1 Introduction
The birth of Aleo stems from the realization of an impossible desire-to establish a truly personal and truly private user experience on the Internet.
Aleo is the first platform to provide completely private applications:
- Use distributed systems and zero-knowledge cryptography to protect user data on the web. At the core layer of Aleo, it provides users and application developers with unlimited computing and absolute privacy.
Aleo's underlying architecture is a default private, open source, and web-born blockchain system, but it can solve the related deficiencies of existing blockchain applications.
With Aleo, users can access truly personalized web services without having to give up control of their private data.
We believe that Aleo will reshape the role of distributed systems in society and introduce unprecedented new web experiences.
2. Challenges faced by blockchain ecosystem applications
For most people, blockchain is just a concept. They are "utilized" by a small group of technicians, activists and speculators. Although most blockchains are permissionless, this does not mean that everyone can access them, because blockchain-related concepts and terminology introduce real barriers. Many people call it a blockchain entry problem.
More importantly:
-
1) The existing blockchain is not enough to meet the needs of real-world applications. For example
, the idea of building smart contract mixers and dark pools on Ethereum still has flaws. Without privacy, these applications cannot fully protect user activity. It doesn't work at all. For companies, the benefits of running business logic and data on a globally consistent platform are compelling. However, lack of privacy is a fundamental obstacle to compliance with the operating guidelines. In order to be available in the real world, we need a private blockchain by default. -
2) The development of technology should not only be for the technology itself.
For us, technology that can solve real-world problems is more worthy of development. At present, many blockchains are built not to solve problems, but to find problems.
We believe that we should start with the user experience and then return to the technology itself.
The best technology should be:
simple to use, even pleasing, and can make the world a better place. -
3) New technologies attract participants who complicate the value proposition of the technology.
We have found that similar situations exist in many ecosystems, including our own ecosystems.
For example, the recent emergence of closed-source scalable engines is the second wave of the original era of "permissioned blockchains." Needless to say, locking in suppliers is rarely a good thing, especially when it is designed into a "trustless" solution. By building a technology that is completely controlled by one company and can only be obtained from one company, by definition, it is a "trusted" solution. In order to demonstrate the value proposition of the new technology, the solution should be open source and permissionless.
3. Next-generation web applications
In the next ten years, web services will develop into true personal services, not only provided in a browser, but also in many other ways. It will serve every intimate detail of our personal lives. There are already examples to prove this point. For example, in the past five years, the number of home intelligent assistants has grown from zero to 500 million network-connected devices. Our private lives have become a public commodity, and as web services become more personal, we need to rethink how to control our data.
Today, there is no such thing as private web data.
The current situation is that
online web data belongs to others. The current web business model is to provide free services to exchange personal data. This model is outdated, and there are disagreements between users and suppliers. Users are forced to give up their data in exchange for the services they want, at the expense of personal privacy. In order to provide services, suppliers have to bear the risk of managing user data and face the impact of data storage, data processing, and data reporting. The fact is that it doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t be.
3.1 Users do not have to hand over their private data
Instead, users should be able to run their data on transparent algorithms provided by the supplier. Suppliers do not need to store, process or report user data. On the contrary, the supplier should be able to transfer their work to the user, and only verify the user's response. By providing services in this way, neither the user nor the supplier will know the information they should not know, and the control of personal data is still in the control of the user.
The existing web is a subset of this model, and users can use their existing known web knowledge to interact with Aleo. Moreover, by introducing private applications as a new layer into the existing web, vendors can provide users with a new experience without replacing the existing technology stack.
4. About Aleo
Aleo is built for the web.
Unlike other solutions that want to replace the web, Aleo's mission is to integrate with the web.
- For users, Aleo introduces a new experience that is truly personal and truly private;
- For developers, Aleo introduces a new programming model that can be integrated with existing web applications.
In the coming days, we will release Develper Preview I.
Unlike existing solutions that seek to replace it, Aleo aims to integrate with it. For users, Aleo introduces a truly personal and truly personal new experience. For developers, Aleo introduces a programming model that integrates with existing web applications.
In order to write private applications on Aleo intuitively and conveniently, we are developing a programming language called Leo. Leo looks and feels like a traditional programming language. However, Leo's bottom layer is much more complicated. Leo abstracts the concept of low-level encryption, making it easy to integrate private applications into the existing technology stack.
4.1 Aleo Studo-the first zero-knowledge application development IDE
For developers, Aleo Studio aims to simplify the development cycle. At the bottom, Aleo Studio connects you to the network, making it easy for you to quickly test and publish transactions on the web.
To simplify packaging and sharing work, we built a package manager for Leo. Aleo package manager is the first zero-knowledge circuit package manager. It includes collaboration features such as teams and organizations to easily collaborate with friends and colleagues on private applications. In addition, the Aleo Package Manager is integrated with Aleo Studio, making it easy to import and publish new packages without having to leave the editor.
This is just the first of many steps to start Aleo, and we hope developers will give it a try.
We want Leo to become the new standard for writing private applications on the web, and believe that by providing it with the best toolkit and infrastructure, application developers will help us integrate technology and make private applications become the web for every user Part of the experience. Because private data should be private. Private data should be just private.
Reference
[1] Howard Wu Blog Welcome to Aleo on August 19, 2020 .