How the Aleo community paved the road to mainnet

The Aleo community is united around a straightforward concept: that we deserve a more secure internet, and a zero-knowledge network that’s private by default is the way to accomplish that.

This journey began with the launch of Aleo Testnet 1 in 2020 and has seen incredible milestones, including the largest setup ceremony in blockchain history, numerous testnets, and various incentive programs. These initiatives have tested Aleo's technical architecture, validated its crypto-economic design, and fostered a vibrant ecosystem of developers, provers, miners, and ambassadors.

Aleo has grown into an inspiring community that includes more than 500,000 active Discord members, more than 10,000 programs already deployed, and over 300 Aleo Ambassadors. The Aleo Network Foundation has awarded 40M Aleo Credits and $8M+ in incentives to the community through a variety of programs that have helped strengthen the network.

Today, we celebrate our community’s contributions to Aleo’s mission and, in particular, their commitment to advancing ZK technology through our incentivized testnets, competitions, and programs. 

Testnet 1 

2020

In December 2019, Aleo Systems was founded by Howard Wu, Michael Beller, Collin Chin, and Raymond Chu. It was created as “the first platform for fully private applications,” by providing zero-knowledge cryptography and programming tools for blockchain developers. 

In June 2020, Aleo released its developer preview featuring Aleo Studio and its Leo v1 coding language in August. It also launched testnet1, an implementation of the ZEXE research paper.

Aleo Setup Ceremony 

August 2021 

The Aleo Setup Ceremony is a landmark event in blockchain history, recognized as the largest multiparty computation (MPC) inspired by Zcash's Powers of Tau. Over 2,200 global participants contributed to securing Aleo's foundational zkSNARKs, setting the groundwork for decentralized private compute (DPC) capabilities. This setup laid the foundation for Aleo's Universal, Inner, and Outer setups, ensuring a robust and secure network.

Testnet 2 

2021 - 2022

Testnet2 was launched in 2021, with provers running over 10,000 nodes and producing millions of zero-knowledge proofs — more than any other platform in history – testing the technical architecture of the Network and validating its crypto-ergonomic design. 

During Testnet2, the team fixed critical consensus issues, including an architectural change from vanilla Nakamoto Consensus to ASERT, and established multiple mining pools to distribute hash rate and ensure network control and accountability.

Within Aleo, miners and provers earned 15 million Aleo Credits for successfully mining blocks, contributing to Aleo codebases, and utilizing new types of hardware (such as GPUs) to  improve the performance of zero-knowledge proofs. 

Testnet 2 Incentives

Jan 2022

The Testnet 2 Incentives included rewards for active mining nodes, significant bonuses for the top 100 miners, recognition for developers with merged GitHub pull requests, and specific rewards for mining pool beta testers and registered pool operators.

Testnet 3 

2022 -  2023

Testnet3 marked a significant advance from Testnet2. Most importantly, it brought a new consensus algorithm, AleoBFT, which combines a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm (based on DiemBFT) with a work-based compensation scheme for provers. It also introduced Deploy & Execute, allowing for ZK programs to be deployed by developers and interacted with by users on Aleo. It involved incentives for community contributions across two phases: the Prover Incentives Program and the Deploy Incentives Program.

Prover Incentives Program 

January 2023

In January 2023, Aleo concluded testnet3’s program focused on incentivizing prover participation for ZK proof generation after the introduction of the new AleoBFT.  Throughout the eight weeks, Aleo witnessed over 44,000 provers connect to the Network from over 94 countries globally. The coinbase_target, akin to network difficulty, peaked at around 750 million Proofs Per Second (PPS). This validated the hypothesis, separating block production from coinbase generation allowed for provers to compute proofs at their desired scale and a number of proving pools helped make proving more accessible.

Deploy Incentives Program 

August 2023

Aleo launched its testnet3 Deploy Incentives Program to encourage developers to write and deploy applications on the Network. The community aimed to drive organic use of the Aleo protocol and create an initial set of useful programs for its on-chain program registry. 

The Deploy Incentives Program aimed to encourage developers to write and deploy applications on the Aleo network. The program received over 1,000 valid submissions, narrowed down to 130 unique GitHub repositories, and awarded 6 million Aleo Credits to high-quality projects.

Prover Incentives II Program 

July 2024

The goal of  Prover Incentives II was to validate the coinbase reward mechanism and the associated puzzle. After finalizing the puzzle design, this program aimed to encourage provers to participate in the validation process. Running from July 1-15, 2024, on Testnet Beta, the Aleo Network Foundation offered 1 million credits to participants as an incentive.

Events & Community Engagement

Aleo's commitment to advancing ZK technology extends beyond testnets through various programs and competitions, including the Ambassador Program, ZPrize, zkML, and Enigma.

Aleo Ambassador Program 

2022

The Ambassador Program was established to foster a community of people who wanted to create quality and helpful content (both technical and non-technical) about Aleo. Since its founding, more than 415 individuals have taken on the role to showcase the incredible contributions that community members had made. After mainnet launch, the Ambassador Program will take an active role in the governance of the network. 

The Ambassador Program fosters a community of contributors who create quality content about Aleo. This program has been instrumental in promoting Aleo's mission and ensuring community engagement.

ZPrize 

2022 | 2023

The inaugural ZPrize competition was launched in 2022 by Aleo’s Alex Pruden and several prominent Web3 builders, with more than 30 companies sponsoring over $7 million in prizes. There were three goals of the first ZPrize competition:

• Improve baseline performance of key general algorithms

• Increase diversity and availability of low-level libraries for cryptographic proofs

• Increase awareness of the groundbreaking potential of zero-knowledge cryptography

The results were transformative, with average improvement across categories between 2.3x and 11.3x. Submissions are open source and located on the ZPrize Github. With significant improvements in latency, throughput, and efficiency, the ZPrize competitions have set new benchmarks in the industry.

zkML 

May 2023

The zkML (Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning) program is another innovative effort by Aleo, focused on integrating machine learning with zero-knowledge proofs. Aleo’s zkML initiative was created to support projects enhancing the field of machine learning with zero-knowledge proofs while providing invaluable support to developers seeking to build solutions in this field.

Enigma

December 2023

Aleo launched Enigma, a first-of-its-kind game, at Devconnect in 2023. Enigma is a series of events and workshops designed to bring together the brightest minds in ZK technology. Developers teamed up to solve intricate puzzles built on Aleo and compete for the winning prize. 

Mainnet

2024

Aleo is rapidly approaching its much-anticipated mainnet launch. Over the past five years, our developer community worked hard to help us achieve our vision of a zero-knowledge web where privacy and security are paramount. 

Aleo has taken significant precautions as it prepares for launch, engaging three independent security research firms — Trail of Bits, NCC Group, and zkSecurity — to audit snarkOS and snark VM, the backbone of the Aleo Network. You can view the findings and resolutions of that audit, which ran over 18 weeks in 2023. We conducted additional audits in 2024, including ARC-41, among other critical fixes and improvements.   

In addition, December saw the launch of the Aleo Network Foundation, which serves to guide and support Aleo as it becomes a fully decentralized and open-source Network. Its key initiatives include developer education, grants programs, and product incubation.

What’s Next

The years-long collective effort of hundreds of thousands of people across the globe to bring the Aleo Network to mainnet is nothing short of extraordinary — and there will continue to be ample opportunity to build together in this exciting new stage for Aleo.

Aleo's testnets and incentive periods have been pivotal in driving the development of a secure and private zero-knowledge network. These initiatives have validated Aleo's technical framework and built a strong, engaged community ready to lead the network into its mainnet phase. As we look forward to the mainnet launch, the contributions of every participant in these programs will continue to shape the future of Aleo and the broader blockchain ecosystem.