Why I Invested Heavily Into This Layer 1 Project

26 min readMar 9, 2022

I first heard of Aleph Zero back in March 2021 when I signed up for their email list.

I fully intended to invest in their presale event at $0.10 but things got in the way and I totally missed out on it, much to my regret. Alas, it was not meant to be however I followed their progress and loved what I was seeing and reading from the team.

I watched as it climbed to $1.88 and, kicking myself, I decided to wait until it came down before I started investing.

I am now at my max for investment in Aleph Zero and now feel comfortable holding and waiting on their staking to go live on the main net and happy to hold for the long term until the project fully realises its goals.

Aleph Zero is not immediately easy to understand so I wanted to write a comprehensive introduction to anyone new to the Aleph Zero platform.

SO WHY DID I INVEST?

What is Aleph Zero and why another Layer 1?

Aleph Zero is built for enterprise, Web 3.0, and DeFi use-cases as a fast and high-throughput blockchain built with a DAG-based consensus protocol.

They’re developing a privacy-centric framework with use cases that span multiple addressable markets, including the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, healthcare, gaming, digitization, supply chain management, and more.

It is a novel blockchain protocol based on a Directed Acyclic Graph algorithm. It solves the current solutions’ shortcomings and the problem known as Blockchain Trillema: decentralization, security and scalability

Decentralization. Rather than being managed by a single entity, blockchains distribute control over the network equally to all participants.

Security. Blockchain networks should have ironclad defences that prevent malicious entities from taking over.

Scalability. Blockchains should support an enormous number of transactions and users without faltering by increasing fees and transaction times.

However Aleph Zero is taking it further and they not only recognise the blockchain trilemma they recognise there are other challenges within this trilemma:

Privacy
Security
Scalability
Cost
Speed

They all go hand in hand and this is the mission of Aleph Zero, to become the best base layer to build web 3.0 applications

PEER REVIEWED

The first thing you will hear about Aleph Zero is that it is peer-reviewed.

What the hell does that mean?

Well, back in 2019 the first ACM the Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT) took place in Zurich, Switzerland. It’s one of the top academic conferences in the distributed ledger space.

AFT committee consists of world-class academics from MIT, ETH Zurich, Cornell University, and VMware Research among others.

Out of 60+ submissions, only 16 were accepted to appear at the conference and Aleph Protocol was one of them.

The conference is in its fourth year and The AFT 2022 conference is currently scheduled to be held on September 18–21, 2022

Adam Gagol, Damian Lesniak, Damian Straszak, and Michal Swietek — published it on arXiv. check it out here!

Basically, it’s a huge deal, a lot of very intelligent people are in attendance and only the elite will be chosen to present their papers.

IS IT A DAG OR A BLOCKCHAIN?

What is a blockchain?

The best way I can think to describe it is to imagine a conveyor belt of boxes (blocks), all the same size and equally spaced out and linked together.

Depending on the type of blockchain, within each block are three main pieces of information:

Data: Typically, but not limited to, transaction data between two parties e.g. John Sent Lucy 0.1 Bitcoin on the 30th January 2022 at 13.46pm

A Hash key: This identifies the block that the current information is going into.

Previous hash key: The current block also stores the hash key of the previous block, which is what links it together.

To make it even more secure there is not only 1 conveyor belt of blocks there are hundreds of conveyor belts in a network, and all the blocks are distributed to each of the conveyor belts and these are called nodes.

So, if a block is corrupted on 1 conveyor belt (node) it could be quickly identified and rectified, and the node that has corrupted it will be punished in some way. Blocks that are tampered with will be rejected by other nodes in the network.

All the nodes have to agree that all the previous blocks are correct and this is called Consensus, meaning that all the nodes have to agree on the data that is being presented.

There are different methods of consensus with the most popular ones being

Proof of Work - PoW - Which Bitcoin uses. It requires a participant node to prove that the work done and submitted by them qualifies them to receive the right to add new transactions to the blockchain and receive a reward, in this case, Bitcoin. However, this whole mining mechanism of bitcoin needs high energy consumption and a longer processing time.

Proof of Stake - PoS -is another common consensus algorithm that evolved as a low-cost, low-energy consuming alternative to the PoW algorithm. It involves the allocation of responsibility in maintaining the public ledger to a participant node in proportion to the number of virtual currency tokens held by it. However, this comes with the drawback that it incentivises token hoarding instead of spending.

There are other kinds of consensus mechanisms such as Delegated Proof of Stake, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Proof of Activity, Proof of Capacity, Proof of Burn, Proof of Elapsed Time, Proof of Identity, Proof of Authority and there will no doubt be more in the future.

Useful to note that in a recent paper comparing consensus mechanisms PBFT didn’t fare well when it came to scalability, but we’ll talk about that later and why it pertains to Aleph Zero

Zhang, S. and Lee, J., 2020. Analysis of the main consensus protocols of blockchain. ICT Express, 6(2), pp.93–97.

And…What the hell does this have to do with Aleph Zero and it being a DAG?

Well, it’s useful to understand how an ordinary blockchain works before going on to look at a DAG.

What is a DAG?

The acronym “DAG” stands for Directed Acyclic Graph. Although it is relatively new to blockchain, it is quite a common structure in computer science and mathematics.

Remember, as with the blockchain we’re still essentially dealing with a database, a ledger of sorts. So with a DAG we’re connecting information together not in a chain but in the form of nodes and connections, or to give them their correct names vertices (blocks) and edges (arrows or connections).

Now to visualise this we can break down the acronym DAG starting with G for Graph

If you’ve ever done a mindmap this is what a graph essentially is when it comes to defining the G in DAG. It is a tree-like structure with interconnected nodes as its ‘branches.

Since each node can have more than one parent root, the model allows for more transactions to be validated simultaneously. This is because users do not have to wait for transactions to complete before processing a new one, as they do with the blockchain, remembering that each block is dependent on the previous one.

With the graph, if we give it some rules when making connections we can come up with some interesting tasks for it to do.

Now onto the A in DAG -Acyclic

Acyclic means — non-cyclic

So this means there are rules to avoid cycles within the graph.

The D in DAG is for Direction

This means there is a defined direction for the graph to flow in.

If we put all this together we have a graph that has rules that the flow goes in a specific direction and has no cycles.

How this all relates to blockchain and Aleph Zero is that there are some pros to using a DAG structure rather than a blockchain structure

Pros of DAG

Suited for micro-transactions and high volumes of transactions
Eliminates the need for mining equipment
Fees may be reduced significantly
Much lower energy consumption

Usually, it’s not easy to decentralize a DAG to the same level as blockchain. In Aleph Zero, they are implementing a mechanism that chooses rotating committee members randomly (in the test net they are usually using 128 nodes, but they are aiming for a much higher number).

There’s plenty of room for different DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies). Just now it depends on what you’re using the DLT for e.g. if you’re sending $4 million around the world, much better to use the blockchain. If you’re buying coffee at Starbucks much better to use DAG.

There’s obviously a LOT more to it than I have described above but I’m simplifying it in my head to understand it better.

HOW SECURE IS ALEPH ZERO?

Aleph Zero ensures ultimate safety with three qualities: being asynchronous, leader-free, and Byzantine Fault Tolerant.

Asynchronicity. Aleph Zero does not rely on any timing assumptions and ensures that all honest transactions will be confirmed even during times of total asynchrony of the network. The outcome is both DDoS resilience and easy protocol recovery after the network partitions.

Leader-free (leaderless). Aleph Zero is decentralized and leaderless. It does not have a single node in control of creating a total ordering of units at any stage of the process. This quality provides not only a greater degree of decentralization than many existing protocols — but also guards against timed DDoS attacks that can be aimed at validators.

BFT. Aleph Zero can tolerate up to 33% of malicious committee members without an effect on the validation process. Each transaction is confirmed as soon as 67% of the members agree upon it.

ALEPH ZERO PRODUCTS

Liminal -Multichain Privacy layer for the Web

The first hybrid privacy solution on the market

Liminal offers innovative security measures based on a unique combination of “zero-knowledge” proofs (ZK-SNARKs) and Secure Multiparty Computation (sMPC).

You’ve probably heard of the phrase zero-knowledge proofs or ZK-Snarks, I certainly had but never fully understood it.

Zk-SNARK is a zero-knowledge proof protocol used in encryption, and is an acronym that stands for “Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge.”

A zk-SNARK is cryptographic proof that allows one party to prove it possesses certain information without revealing that information.

So imagine you possessed certain information about something and wanted to prove it but you didn’t want to reveal your identity you would use a zk-snark. This proof is made possible using a secret key created before the transaction takes place.

The second solution (sMPC) involves keeping sensitive information off-chain on several different nodes. This data can only be accessed if the nodes conduct a secure handshake. No one computer can access the encrypted contents without a unanimous consensus.

These two solutions complement each other by eliminating their respective problems. ZK-SNARKs allow for basic transfers yet are incapable of dealing with multi-user interactions. Zero-knowledge proofs can prove the correctness of the state update of their private state (for instance, how many private tokens they own on each address) that can be verified by blockchain.

What ZK-SNARKs are not capable of achieving is a concept of a global private state — which is state-owned by a smart contract that would be updated after any of the users transacts with it. This is where sMPC’s have their moment to shine. They can be used to implement the concept of a global private state, an example of which would be a decentralized exchange based on an automated market maker model without the need of revealing the value of each transaction. The problem with sMPC is that on its own, it is prohibitively slow; hence Liminal will use this solution only for the computations that need to interact directly with the global private state. The remaining computations can be performed and validated using ZK-SNARKs.

The Liminal product has had a lot of attention. An article on Medium from Block54 Capital stated

“…It’s a pretty powerful, privacy-centric framework that we believe to be the most competitive on the market — and we already know of some top-notch teams looking to build on it. That alone would be enough of a reason to seriously consider partnering with the team…” (Block54, Why we invested in Aleph Zero)

Universal Wallet and DEX

Creating a truly universal wallet for cryptocurrencies is one of the major directions of Aleph Zero development.

That’s why Aleph propose a truly decentralized wallet — the Common Wallet — running on the Aleph Zero protocol that can technically operate with any other cryptocurrency, starting from the most popular Bitcoin and Ether to other less popular ones.

Thanks to Aleph Zero being a DAG, the protocol is mining-free, meaning minimal transaction fees. Its decentralized security brings it to the completely trustless level, while the speed of Aleph lets you finally transact with Bitcoin in just a few seconds.

This subsequently allows creating decentralized exchanges for high-scale cryptocurrency trading as well. You can read more about Common at getcommon.com

PARTNERSHIPS

Flidy Technologies

Aleph Zero will become a key element in growing blockchain adoption in Nigeria by partnering with a local startup incubator, Flidy Technologies.

Built by Shina Akinboboye and Theo Adeniran, Flidy Technologies aims to deploy capital towards 20 blockchain startups over the next two years. “We’re happy to say that Aleph Zero will become the default recommended infrastructure. Shina and Theo will be providing $AZERO coins to cover the costs of building and maintaining incubated startups”, says Antoni Zolciak, Aleph Zero’s co-founder. “In addition to the above, Flidy will also provide seed funding to help cover initial expenses, while Aleph Zero and Cardinal Cryptography team — among other partners — will be happy to assist with partnerships and mentoring.”

Click here for more info about Flidy partnership

CLST

CLST and Aleph Zero announced a partnership to enhance lending and borrowing of specific digital currencies in countries where the new financial practice is approved.

The partnership will explore optimal management of Aleph Zero Foundation’s treasuries, tap into liquidity provisioning of the protocol’s native token AZERO and facilitate the institutional adoption of stablecoins which will be issued on the Aleph Zero protocol. The companies’ founders say that the partnership will enhance liquidity management to achieve efficient price discovery.

Click here for more info about the CLST partnership

Gatenox

Led by a former founder and CEO of Coinfirm, Gatenox aims to become a go-to decentralized identity wallet for exchanges, fintech companies, and banks. Users, on the other hand, will be able to profit from sharing their data.

The challenge lies in ensuring the highest possible privacy standards whenever biometric solutions are concerned. Aleph Zero’s MPC-based privacy technology, Liminal, will allow all users of Gatenox to prove that relevant information is correct without revealing the contents of that information, as well as ultimately provide the security that’s on par with hardware wallets.

Click here for more info about the Gatenox partnership

Substrate Builders Program

Aleph Zero is honoured to have been accepted into the Parity Substrate Builders Program, an exciting initiative that supports novel Web 3.0 solutions.

The Parity Substrate Builders Program is an initiative whose end goal is to support and assist promising Web 3.0 projects. By doing so, they hope to create a broad ecosystem of blockchain solutions that take advantage of Parity Technologies’ experience and resources with Substrate.

AngelBlock

AngelBlock is a fintech investment platform connecting investors with noteworthy startups to further democratize fundraising.

Once ready, Aleph Zero will become a primary go-to recommended infrastructure for startups looking to utilize blockchain. Being a new generation of an all-in-one platform with privacy-enhancing features, I’m confident that Aleph Zero will establish itself as one of the leading technologies powering the shift to Web3.
Alex Strzesniewski, founder and CEO at AngelBlock

Click here to read more info about the Angelblock partnership

Diamond Atlas Capital

Over the past 12 months, Aleph Zero has developed a strategic partnership with Diamond Atlas, utilizing their expertise on all things essential in generating waves in the Web 3.0 ecosystem. This includes decentralized finance, corporate business, product management, technical integration, analytics, and digital marketing.

“Working with Aleph Zero over this past year has been incredible. Their vision for the future of Aleph Zero and the Web 3.0 space, in general, is revolutionary; we can truly say they are pioneers in their field,”
said Leith Shankland, Co-Founder of Diamond Atlas

Click here to read more info about the Diamond Atlas Capital partnership

IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY

The community are obviously an important aspect of any project and we’ve seen in the past that when the community gets behind a project it can really drive it forward.

You need only look at XRP, Shiba Inu, Dogecoin, and Verasity to see what happens when a community really gets behind a project.

Aleph Zero is creating a network of individuals who are fast becoming the voice, the marketing team, the social influencers and the drivers of growth that will ultimately help Aleph Zero become one of the biggest layer 1 solutions on the market.

Aleph Zero has now introduced the Ambassador program.

Aleph Zero’s Brand Ambassadors play an essential role in educating the wider community and collaborating with the core team on translations, community management, running meetups and local conferences, as well as a variety of different activities. Our Ambassadors also have the opportunity to beta-test new features of Aleph Zero and its partner products!

This is an essential step in making the community of Aleph Zero get more involved with the project. This also fosters a loyalty that is hard to measure in the growth of a project.

Click here to learn more about the Ambassador program

USE CASES FOR ALEPH ZERO

Internet of Things

The IoT sector is vast and diverse. This technology shares data constantly in order to operate. This data is then stored on the provider’s servers to improve products or develop the user experience. If such a database is centralized, it could be attacked and the data could become compromised. Devices also could be backdoored through a malicious update or receive malicious communications without knowing their validity.

A decentralized protocol for IoT requires a fast and scalable system. IoT has also often been associated with micro-payments, but current systems are cost-prohibitive, slow, and centralized.

Unlike current systems, Aleph Zero is fast, highly scalable, secure, decentralized, and allows low-cost value transfer for any size of a transaction. Once it is implemented on IoT networks, with an open-sourced community, we can collaboratively contribute to and produce compelling solutions which cater to devices.

Smart Contracts

Distributed ledger technology will make a global impact across many industries, increasing efficiency and encouraging collaboration across systems in which entities do not have to trust a third party. Smart contracts open the way for developers to create almost any kind of application, for any business. This is why Aleph is committed to their development.

In Aleph, we are creating fast, secure, and Turing complete smart contracts that will scale for applications that require high computing power. This opens a new world of possibilities for systems with complex machine learning components and other high-scale automated services. In the future, it can allow the deployment of trusted and fully autonomous agents.

It is impossible to predict all of the ways this technology will be used. However, smart contracts running on a decentralized network that provides real-world performance is the best chance of realizing new possibilities.

Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management is extremely complex. The process of creating and distributing goods involves payments, invoices, multiple entities responsible for providing services, and thousands of computational decisions across multiple international locations, and it can cost significant capital and time to be custom tailored.

Aleph can solve many problems within supply chains. For example, a currency stored on the Aleph Zero protocol could simplify payments and accounting. The full history of production, logistics, and distribution could be added to the Aleph network, creating a consistently synchronized and fast distributed record that can be trusted.

Everyone would be able to track down the product from the shop shelf, to it’s transportation, to the origin of where it was produced. This might incentivize companies to transparently prove they aren’t doing things like testing cosmetics on animals or using child labour for their products. An entity could award certificates by verifying vendors’ activities.

Additionally, further simplification of supply chains might lead to lower prices of products and improved quality.

Virtual Game Assets

Paid extensions and rare items often give a serious advantage to the players who obtain them and can have significant financial value. The theft of such items by hackers lowers the positive gaming experience, reducing trust with in-game purchases.

To prevent such situations, a tokenization system could be created on the basis of the Aleph protocol. It would store the complete history of item ownership and would allow free in-game and out-of-game trading with other cryptocurrencies. A cross-game item exchange could be established to allow players to be able to trade value between the games. This would broaden the options for players to buy in-game items.

Speculation on an item exchange could bring new forms of rewards for players by exchanging their in-game efforts for other forms of value. For the game developers, it would create new revenue streams, higher engagement, and higher competitiveness. If the game studios will be able to create more value for the players, the whole industry might benefit. Additionally, the tokenization of virtual game assets could bring security and transparency to the gaming industry, especially to multiplayer and casino games, which would also be beneficial for the whole industry for users and developers.

The decentralization of virtual game assets would have to be based on a platform that would not negatively affect the gaming experience. We see Aleph Zero as the best platform to suit these needs; besides its high speed, scalability, and security, its interoperability would enable players to exchange their assets conveniently.

Decentralized Domain Name System (DNS)

DNS is what translates domain names into IP addresses. It powers the internet as we know it, and this makes it a potential point of failure. That’s why DNS servers are distributed around the globe, but their decentralization is only technical as most of the servers are maintained by large organizations that are influenced by governments and large companies.

Since DNS providers can monitor internet traffic, they can potentially hijack users’ internet usage, spy on users and companies, or censor the internet. We have to trust the organizations in control to not perform malicious actions. In this case, we believe it’s better to trust math and have provable decentralization than have these risks.

Aleph can become the foundation for a truly decentralized DNS service built into web browsers. This would become the technological trust layer of the internet. It would not allow maliciously altering the end IP address on the DNS side, and it would not need certificates vouching for websites’ legitimacy or to encrypt the connection, as it would be a standard. The connection information wouldn’t be stored anywhere, improving privacy. It could even speed up the connection, compared to traditional DNS servers

Universal Wallet and Decentralized Exchange

Creating a truly universal wallet for cryptocurrencies is one of the major directions of Aleph Zero's development.

The problem with many current solutions is that although they are used to store keys for decentralized currencies, they are centralized themselves. This makes them easier to attack or manipulate, and therefore the security of the assets is not guaranteed. That’s why we propose a truly decentralized wallet — the Common Wallet — running on the Aleph Zero protocol that can technically operate with any other cryptocurrency, starting from the most popular Bitcoin and Ether to other less popular ones.

This subsequently allows creating decentralized exchanges for high-scale cryptocurrency trading as well.

You can read more about Common at getcommon.com

Asset Digitization

Blockchain technology is seen as a way to simplify many legal processes — such as buying and selling real estate, applying for and receiving a loan, or holding stocks and bonds.

Today, to buy a home — anywhere in the world — apart from the transaction, the buyer and seller need to take care of title management, which involves hiring lawyers and brokers, finding insurance, and so forth. The paperwork complicates the process, but on the other hand, this is the only way to perform these massive transactions while not completely trusting the other party.

Getting a loan for buying a house complicates the process even more. It involves providing documents that could stand as proof that the one applying is able to return the loan and for what amount.

For stocks and bonds, there might be a need for accreditation, but it also involves receiving dividends and transferring the assets if needed.

Ultimately, looking at these processes on a higher scale, and having centralized entities to validate the transactions and proofs, exposes the major inefficiency of the current setting. The processes take too many steps and involve too many people for what should be a simple exchange of value.

That’s why a decentralized platform like Aleph Zero can make asset exchange and transaction validation much more efficient. It brings security and speed to the process, but at the same time, its smart contracts can be used in the form of “code as law”. Therefore, a lot of the paperwork can be completely automated, simplifying the transactions to just “You give me the money — I give you the asset,” with a guarantee that everything runs as it should and there’s no possibility for manipulation.

But there are still challenges that need to be solved — connecting the real world exchange to the “digital paperwork” done by smart contracts. In this case, there still might be some need for a trusted entity to supervise the processes, but we believe this field can also be revolutionized.

Notary Signatory

In the current system, a notary is responsible for witnessing that the sides are willing to sign an agreement with their own will, while being conscious, of sound mind, and so forth. That’s why it’s still necessary to visit a notary public in order to transfer a title, declaring power of attorney, and perform other similar activities.

However, with the technology we already have, it can be done 100% online with a simple video call that would be recorded on a secure, decentralized ledger and stored there as a file, together with the information about the transaction and the identities of the people involved. It could then be accessed at any point in time if any doubt occurs.

Such a solution could eventually replace the need for notary publics, but before it can be achieved, the new system would have to ensure that the transaction and the parties involved are honest. This is a complex problem that could be solved by utilizing Aleph.

Transparent Public Document Access

Government transparency that enables trust and accountability is one of the pillars of democracy. Such transparency allows media, independent auditors, and regular people to assess the government’s actions and, before they are assessed, to discover them. Although some bad actors might hide parts of their activity for political or financial gains, every time such manipulation is disclosed, trust in the government falls rapidly.

The same issues happen too often in business, as well. Dieselgate was one of the most recent examples of such activity. Volkswagen intentionally cheated on laboratory emissions tests and distributed millions of vehicles that far surpassed the limits outlined in the Clean Air Act. When it was exposed, the manufacturer lost trust and had to pay enormous fines. Such activities are usually exposed at some point in time.

In a world where trust is highly valuable, losing it can end up with major revolutions, both in governments and businesses. After all, that’s why blockchain emerged. DLTs could impact this area heavily by replacing trust with secure, decentralized platforms.

For example, copyright and patent claims could be easily assessed by data timestamps that can’t be altered. It’s one of the simplest features of DLT and some entities are already using it. General transparency might not be suitable for all cases — for example, national security. But there are many areas that might benefit from total or partial transparency. / Transparent Public Document Access

The Aleph Zero network can be both a public and a private ledger. Therefore, the public network can work as a hub and is suitable for holding the data that can and should be accessible by the general public. Some private chains (the “spokes,” as we call them) connected to the public record can enhance the security of other aspects of governing while still operating internally, with access control.

Using Aleph Zero on a public layer can improve efficiency in many areas of governing and business and improve the communication of the two with citizens. Besides the obvious benefit that a decentralized ledger can reduce the amount of paperwork and compliance, it can also bring innovations like algorithmic laws that would be sufficient for emerging technologies, rather than putting them into grey areas as often happens now.

Unless the trust aspect can be handed over to decentralized technology like Aleph Zero, we will continue to witness trust crises for governments and businesses. Only with broadly implemented open data access policies (where needed), we can innovate and legislate faster to grow the global economy.

Automatic Tax Payments

Tax payments are fuelling the economy on many levels, but for an average person, they are neither transparent enough nor easy to understand if they have to calculate them themselves. Making a mistake in this area can be very costly, as many have unfortunately discovered.

This is why there is a strong need to simplify and automate this area. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2016, 800 attendees took part in a poll on blockchain-based taxes, and 73% of respondents expected that the most developed countries will create blockchain-based tax systems by 2023–2025. It’s no longer an ‘if’. The government of Estonia has already enabled their e-residents to pay taxes online with their decentralized solution.

Such a system requires a major infrastructure revolution. Just as in Estonia, it would require the provision of a digital layer to the citizens’ identities, to know who or what entity is paying the tax, and then have the record of the amount that needs to be paid or that has been paid automatically.

A centralized solution would — most probably — be insufficient. Such a centralized database can be a desired target of hackers, who after breaching the security, could steal identities, create fake ones, or extract information about the incomes of individuals, along with their identities and addresses. A decentralized solution would be much more secure. / Automatic Tax Payment

With Aleph Zero, the room for tax optimization can still be preserved but the security risk is eliminated. With all transactions held on Aleph Zero, and a public ledger and smart contracts enabled on the platform, taxes could be calculated and charged automatically and always correctly. Automatic tax payments could also make cross-border VAT settlements seamless, and with a broad implementation, it could even completely remove the need for accounting, or at least for issuing invoices.

With its scalability, speed, security, and interoperability, Aleph Zero is an ideal solution for creating such an innovative and efficient worldwide-adopted ecosystem.

Automatic Payments and Shared Revenue Agreement

As Bitcoin is becoming an increasingly valid currency to the general public, it — or any other cryptocurrency that could take its place in the future — could be used to do automatic payments with a set of smart contracts.

Of course this is nothing new, and we are used to it with bank accounts and credit cards — and that’s why we have a particular interest in using cryptocurrencies as a development of shared revenue agreements. Revenue sharing models involve taking part in operating profits — or losses — among associated financial actors. This requires the participants to be clear about how the revenue is collected, measured, and distributed. The events that trigger revenue sharing, such as online sales or advertising interactions, and the methods of calculation are not always transparent to everyone involved. Currently, the solution lies in / Automatic Payments and Shared Revenue Agreement detailed descriptions of the methodology written in the contracts, and the parties in these processes are subject to audits for accuracy assurance.

Aleph Zero could bring transparency and efficiency to revenue sharing models, removing the need for trust or audits. It could simplify the agreements. The parties involved, after discussing the aspects of their cooperation, could use a simple UI that would allow them to create smart contracts for their own purposes. They could generate such a contract for a given period of time and from that point, they would be able to receive mutual benefits without unnecessary additional work.

Databases

Data collection has become one of the biggest trends in almost any industry. So-called Big Data is what many business people see as the basis to make well-informed decisions.

The problem is that such big databases are constantly growing in size, collecting lots of data. This leads to overcomplication and makes retrieving actionable insights from the data extremely difficult and time-consuming, which makes managing the database inefficient.

Current centralized solutions are fast, and if speed is the priority, no blockchain solution has developed a good alternative, although Aleph is capable of offering similar UX and speed. The centralized databases are permissioned, which usually supports business needs, but require database administrators and other maintenance costs to keep them running. Centralization also means that the system may have a single point of failure, or be the single point of failure.

Not every database should be redesigned as a distributed ledger, but migrating them to Aleph Zero could bring many benefits to their owners. A decentralized ledger located on servers in multiple geographic locations is more difficult for cyber terrorists to attack. Additionally, there is no need to consider everything “decentralized” as “public”. Aleph is able to run in public or private environments, using the best of these two worlds, while its interoperability allows for seamless integration of businesses operating on different types of blockchain. / Databases

This might bring a great advantage to business partners. A group of companies could share some parts of the Aleph Zero database, gaining efficiency and transparency in their operations. In this setting, the companies wouldn’t have to trust each other and could make better decisions, possibly speeding up their growth.

Blockchain databases are considered inefficient also due to their transaction and mining fees, but as Aleph is completely mining-free, it could lay the foundation for minimal-fee decentralized databases.

Ultimately, Aleph can create a completely new ecosystem that allows businesses to cooperate in new ways, for transparency and higher profits on all sides.

TEAM

The team at Aleph Zero is probably what attracted me to the project the most.

In short, they are a DAG of sorts in that they are a collection of outstanding minds all directly focused on common goals within their own Graph which is Aleph Zero

TOKENOMICS

Circulating supply: 163,530,000
Total supply: 299,999,720
Max supply: Infinite

Market Capitalisation: $208,035,007 (Price $1.28 at time of calculation)

Fully Diluted Valuation: $381,644,959 (Price $1.28 at time of calculation)

30 Million token inflation per year: 90% distributed to validators and 10% will go to ecosystem fund.

STAKING AND BECOMING A VALIDATOR

When you believe in a project so much that you just decide to hold, it’s great that the team understand this and decide to put a reward-based system in place.

Rewards will come in the form of AZERO tokens and this can only be achieved by minting new tokens.

An inflation fund of 30 Million AZERO tokens can be minted each year.

Inflation funds split:

90% of the inflation coins will be distributed to validators and delegators;
10% of the inflation coins will be added to the Ecosystem Fund.

Click here to learn more about staking and becoming a validator

SOCIALS FOR ALEPH ZERO

CONCLUSION

I did advise this was a comprehensive introduction to Aleph Zero.

I have tried to sum up as much information as possible without being overwhelming and hopefully still managed to educate others.

I wrote this as I love researching projects but I recognise a lot of people don’t love research and would rather have all the information in one place without having to dig too deep.

If you like this article please share it and give it a few claps and if you think I have missed anything, which I undoubtedly have, please let me know in the comments.

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