Aleo — truly private and truly personal web experience

Prologue

There are approximately 5 billion active users of the World Wide Web. Each of them browses the websites and interacts with the content from hundreds of servers, networks, locations. We literally can’t imagine our lives without that vast range of web services we use on a daily basis.

The thing is, in the next decade, web services will evolve to become even more personal, living in more places than just your browser. And we can notice it now. Just think of Alexa — an in-home smart assistant, which has become an essential part to half a billion of households all over the world.

The main concern here is that people on the other side know about us more than we do. We quickly moved from saying “I have mentioned that I am willing to have a burger tonight and in a matter of one minute my phone is full of McDonald’s & KFC promotions, which is really cool and convenient” to “I just said that my mattress is a bit too firm to sleep on and my Youtube is full of mattress ads for a week now”.

The Pain

The last statement is as right as it has never been before — if our data lives online, then someone else owns it. The business model of the web is to provide free services in exchange for personal data. The user is forced to give up their data in exchange for services they want, at the cost of personal privacy. The provider bears the risks for managing user data to provide their service, facing the implications of storing, processing, and reporting it. It does not have to be this way and it should not be this way.

Instead, users should be able to run their data on transparent algorithms from the provider. And providers should not need to store, process, or report user data. Instead, they should be able to offload their work to the user and merely verify a response. By providing services this way, neither the user nor the provider learns more than they should, and the control over personal data remains with the user.

The Aleo team has come up with a fascinating and pretty simple painkiller. By introducing private applications as a new layer to the web, providers are able to offer new experiences to users without replacing their stack, while users are able to use the concepts they already know from the previous web interactions!

Web experiences that are truly private and personal

Aleo Team states, that a technology is worth its development when it solves a real world problem. In fact, many technologies are built as solutions in search of the problems. However, a right way is to start from the user experience and work backwards to the technology. The best technologies are easy — even joyful — to use, and make the world better.

Technologies should not be developed for their own sake

Aleo leverages decentralized systems and zero-knowledge cryptography to protect user data on the web. The key thing here is that unlike existing solutions that seek to replace it, Aleo is designed to integrate with it. At its core, Aleo offers users and application developers unbounded compute with absolute privacy.

The Challenge of Ecosystem Adoption

For most, blockchains are just a concept. They are “used” by a small proportion of technologists, activists, and speculators. While most blockchains are permissionless, it does not mean they are accessible to all, as the concepts and terminology introduce real barriers. Many call this an onboarding problem. It’s a lot more fundamental than that.

1. Existing blockchains are inadequate for real-world applications.
   The notion of building smart contract mixers and dark pools on Ethereum remains flawed. Without privacy, these applications cannot fully protect user activity. For companies, the benefits of running business logic and data on a globally consistent platform are compelling. Yet the lack of privacy is a fundamental barrier to complying with operational guidelines.
2. New technologies attract actors who complicate a technology’s value proposition.
   We see it in many ecosystems. The advent of closed-source scalability engines has been a second wave to the initial era of “permissioned blockchains”. It goes without saying that vendor lock-in is rarely a good thing, especially as it pertains to “trustless” solutions. But by building a technology controlled entirely by one company and available only from one company, it is, by definition, a “trusted” solution. To show the value proposition for a new technology, the solution should be open-source and permissionless.

What does Aleo do differently?

By architecting Aleo as a blockchain that is private-by-default, open-source, and built for the web, 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. And for developers, Aleo introduces a programming model that integrates with existing web applications.

Aleo Studio — the first IDE for for writing ZK apps

To write private applications on Aleo intuitively and easily, the team is developing a programming language called Leo. Even though Leo looks and feels just like a traditional programming language, under the hood, Leo is far more complex. Leo abstracts low-level cryptographic concepts and makes it easy to integrate private applications into one’s stack.

To jumpstart the development cycle, the team is building Aleo Studio, the first IDE for writing zero-knowledge applications.

Aleo Studio is designed to simplify the development cycle. It connects builders to the network, making it easy to quickly test and publish transactions on the web.

To make it simple to bundle and share one’s work — there’s 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.

Aleo Team wants Leo to become a new standard for writing private applications on the web. They believe that by providing the best toolkit and infrastructure for it, that application developers will help them to integrate the technology and make private applications a part of every users’ web experience.