About Aleph Zero

What is Aleph Zero?

Based on an original peer-reviewed consensus protocol Aleph Zero is a privacy-enhancing public blockchain featuring integration with the Substrate stack, it solves the shortcomings of current distributed ledger technology platforms by offering superior speed, validation time, scalability, and security.

Aleph Zero is powered by a custom algorithm that takes advantage of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology to create an efficient and decentralized system. It surpasses industry competition by employing a practical approach to the transfer of value and the extensibility of smart contracts. The validation times are always fast regardless of the number of transactions. Aleph Zero represents our vision for decentralized technology at the protocol level and will introduce a more pragmatic future for businesses and technology-seeking methods for exchanging large amounts of data with fast confirmations. The technology was built with customizable business solutions in mind that interact with other parties and allow for settlements to be made on a truly decentralized ledger thus proving the authenticity of centralized records.

A crucial element of Aleph Zero is the "hub and spoke" model it employs, which allows businesses to have a spoke or private instance, that interacts with the main decentralized ledger. Thanks to this solution, businesses can interact with each other in a trustless manner efficiently and cheaply while still maintaining their own private network.

When powered by Golang, Aleph Zero achieved validation times of 416 milliseconds for a simulated amount of 89’600 transactions per second (TPS). The environment this testing was conducted in consisted of 112 Amazon Web Services (AWS) nodes spread across five continents. The current iteration of Aleph Zero was implemented in Rust to allow for integration with Parity’s Substrate technology stack. Technically, the language delivers better performance, however, the integration itself might result in lower numbers than those achieved in the test.

A key feature of Aleph Zero is the way in which it employs both zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and secure multi-party computation (sMPC) to ensure the security and privacy of user data. These two technologies can innovate the way we view internet privacy and help us regain control over the personas we create online. ZK-SNARKs pass a secure and secret key between users, whereas sMPCs safeguard data through multiple computers which cannot access the stored data without unanimous consensus. Both solutions will allow the internet to become a place where our sensitive data is released only with our approval.

Overall, the goal of Aleph Zero is to make it possible for SMBs and enterprises to communicate at a rate close to what they would expect with regular internet communication while still utilizing the benefits of decentralization.