Ecosystem

To better understand what Aleo is, we must first understand the underlying vision of Aleo and why it was created in the first place:

Aleo seeks to shift the balance of power away from monopolies and centralized, self-interested actors towards sovereign individuals. As such, Aleo gives web users back what was taken from them: the right to their privacy. At the same time, Aleo enables developers to seamlessly build web applications that are truly private. Doing so helps developers to no longer have to bear the risk of managing, storing, processing, and reporting user data in order to provide their serivce.

Now that we better understand Aleo’s vision, we can take the second important step towards better understanding what Aleo is. To take this step, we need to fully understand the central issue Aleo seeks to solve.

The internet as it exists today is predominantly shaped by companies whose business models are centered on providing free services in exchange for a user’s personal data. Think about the services of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many more: end users can freely use all the provided services. At the same time, however, they do not have any control over their private user data. Instead, the business models of such services are oriented towards collecting as much data as possible in order to generate a profit from it.

The underlying process of this is always the same:

As a rule of thumb, if a user’s data is uploaded to the internet, someone else owns it because the free services of web companies are provided in exchange for the user’s personal data. This antiquated business model does not align the interests of web users (i.e. privacy) with those of web providers (i.e. generating revenue). If end users wish to gain access to such a freely provided service, the users are forced to give up part of their personal privacy.

The above focused on the privacy risks end users are facing when using a majority of services provided on the internet. The existing model of the internet, however, also introduces great risks to the companies that provide web services. As such, companies relying on managing user data to provide their services bear the great risks of storing, processing, and handling user data. These risks include data leakages and hacking attacks, which can have detrimental consequences.

After having gained a better understanding of Aleo’s vision and the problems Aleo seeks to solve, one may wonder how Aleo’s proposed solution looks like. We will focus on this question in the following.

Firstly, Aleo empowers end users to access web services without having to reveal any personal data. Even in case access to a given web service is restricted to users above a given age or within a certain location, Aloe helps to protect the privacy of end users. In this example, end users can utilize Aleo to verify that their age lies above a given age, without revealing their age or their date of birth.

Secondly, Aleo empowers web companies to provide their services without the need to store, manage, and process user data. Instead of managing user data, web providers can offload the work to the end user (e.g. verifying their age) and verify if the user’s response meets the criteria (e.g. above a given age limit).

Aleo introduces a user experience on the web that is both truly private and truly personal. But how exactly does Aleo achieve this?

Aleo is the first platform ever to offer fully private applications.

Aleo is a layer 1 blockchain architected to be private-by-default and open-source while at the same time being built for the web. By combining these three factors, Aleo can overcome the present shortcomings of blockchain technologies.