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Aleo, Modular and compliant. The ultimate toolkit for building private applications is finally here.

Aleo was born from a desire to achieve the impossible - to build a user experience on the web that is both truly personal and truly private. Aleo is the first platform to offer fully private applications. Aleo achieves this by leveraging decentralized systems and zero-knowledge cryptography to protect user data on the web. At its core, Aleo offers users and application developers unbounded compute with absolute privacy.

By architecting Aleo as a blockchain that is private-by-default, open-source, and built for the web, we believe 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. 

We believe Aleo will reshape the role decentralized systems play in our society and introduce new experiences never before seen on the web.

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.

First, existing blockchains are inadequate for real-world applications. For example, the notion of building smart contract mixers and dark pools on Ethereum remains flawed. Without privacy, these applications cannot fully protect user activity. It simply does not work. 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. To achieve real-world adoption, we need blockchains that are private by default.

Second, technologies should not be developed for their own sake. To us, a technology is worth its development when it solves a real world problem. Instead, many blockchains are built as solutions in search of problems. We believe you have 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.

Third, new technologies attract actors who complicate a technology’s value proposition. We see it in many ecosystems, including ours. For example, the recent 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.

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