Meeting Aleo. Part One.
Welcoming all crypto-enthusiasts and fans of blockchain technology. Today we are going to talk about one of the most prospective blockchains in the industry, Aleo.
With this post I open a series of articles and materials which are dedicated to Aleo. Let’s go!
Aleo aims to completely change the game in blockchain technology industry and Web 3. Using Zero-Knowledge Proof technology the project team was able to create the first truly confidential, Level 1 blockchain meant to protect and preserve both user and application data built in the Aleo network. We’ll talk about the technology itself in the next parts of my Aleo series of articles, but today I’d like to give you a quick overview of the history of the company and the project crew.
The history of “Aleo Systems Inc”.
Started in 2018 in the Western United States in Reno, Nevada.
The founders of a small startup at the time. 3 young and ambitious technology enthusiasts:
Howard Wu(CEO), Collin Chin and Raymond Chu.
Here’s a more extended list, but today there are roughly 50 people working in Aleo’s team:
- Alex Pruden (Chief Operating Officer);
- Anthony DiPrinzio (Ecosystem Growth);
- Elizabeth Chevalier (Director of Administration & Executive Assistant);
- Heather Vasquez (Chief of Staff);
- Michael Beller (COO & CFO);
- Rikke Rasmussen (VP of Design & Product).
2018
Andreessen Horowitz:
“We first met Howard Wu, the founder of Aleo, in 2018. We were instantly impressed by the depth of his knowledge of cryptography and distributed systems, as well as his vision of the potential of cryptocurrencies. He worked very closely with a number of outstanding scientists from Berkeley, Cornell, and other institutions in the field of zero-knowledge proof research. Later that year, Howard published a seminal paper in the field with many of the same collaborators entitled Zexe: Enabling Decentralized Private Computing.”
2021
That’ s how the Aleo story began, and in January 2021, the company shut down a seed round of investments.
By that time, the team had managed to create a fully private and secure blockchain, a full-fledged Aleo programming language called Leo, and the Aleo Studio development environment.
All of these together creates a great environment for developers and the growth of the Aleo ecosystem.
But this is a subject of a separate conversation.
Just four months later, on April 20, 2021, Aleo received its first public round of $28M investment from funds such as:
A16z, Placeholder VC, Galaxy Digital, Variant Capital, and Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Slow Ventures, Dekrypt Capital, Scalar Capital, a_capital, zkValidator, Balaji Srinivasan and Ethereal Ventures.
In 2021–2022 the project team launched testnet, trained and attracted new developers, organized hackathons and just showed people Aleo and its technology.
In general the team worked on recognition and implementation of Aleo brand.
In less than a year the team managed to build a community of ~15k people and familiarize them with their technology.
2022
Today the project team decided to announce the start of an Ambassador program before the launch of the main network and received an investment of $200M from the same A16Z.
New investors from outside of blockchain technology have also joined as well, such as:
Kora Management LP, SoftBank Vision, Tiger Global, Sea Capital and Samsung Next.
I think now the team will feel more confident, will show good results, will successfully launch the Mainnet and take its place in the market.
Useful Links:
Website ~ https://www.aleo.org/
Twitter ~ @AleoHQ ~ https://twitter.com/AleoHQ
GitHub ~ https://github.com/AleoHQ
Community Forum — https://community.aleo.org/
Community Calendar ~ https://www.aleo.org/community/calendar
YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/c/AleoHQ
Developer Documentation ~ https://developer.aleo.org/
Leo Playground ~ https://play.leo-lang.org/
Aleo Block Explorer ~ https://www.aleo.network/
Community Blog ~ https://medium.com/@AleoHQ
Announcements Blog ~ https://www.aleo.org/blog