snarkOS is the decentralized operating system for private applications that makes Aleo possible. The operating system forms the logical backbone for enabling state transitions and helps applications to use a publicly verifiable manner of verifying and storing state on the Aleo blockchain. With snarkOS, data availability guarantees for all programs and transactions on Aleo are enforced. Additionally, the operating system’s consensus mechanism ensures the computation of zero knowledge proofs by verifiers. These zk proofs are computed to checkpoint state on-chain.