Decentralized Governance on Aleph Zero

Decentralization and democracy go hand-in-hand, resulting in power being handed over to the average user. Learn more about our work on ensuring Aleph Zero's decentralization.

Aleph Zero is a blockchain network aiming to achieve complete decentralization. Below you will find the roadmap that will describe the process of decentralizing Aleph Zero from a network validation perspective. As of December 17th 2024, stage 4 of the roadmap is concluded.

This guide will go over the elements we've already implemented as well as those that are still on the horizon.

Step 1

The first step towards decentralization involved introducing the Aleph Zero Foundation nodes that are responsible for ensuring the integrity of the transactions conducted on the network.

At this stage, community members could not become validators, nor were they able to nominate.

Also, there was no inflation at this point, and the foundation's nodes did not receive any rewards for guaranteeing consensus.

Step 2

It is at this moment that Aleph Zero introduced the nomination mechanism, allowing users to delegate their tokens to the foundation nodes.

Once nominating was finally possible, Aleph Zero introduced inflation, incentivizing users to experiment with the system. The inflation mechanism looks as follows: 2.5M tokens are added per month, with 10% going to the ecosystem growth fund and 90% distributed to the nominators.

Each nominator will receive an amount proportionate to their stake.

To ensure that the foundation doesn’t have an economic advantage over the community at this stage, the foundation nodes charge 0% commission.

Step 3

The next step involves introducing external committee validators.

For the time being, the Aleph Zero Foundation will keep a supermajority on the committee yet will give some power to a rotating group of validators.

At this stage, the election mechanism will be initiated, influencing the distribution of tokens.

Each validator will get a reward proportional to their stake increased by the commission they charge the nominators.

Nominators get a reward proportionate to their stake, decreased by the validator's commission.

Step 4

The Aleph Zero Foundation will continue opening the committee to third-party validators until, at last, the community is in charge of the committee.

The Foundation will continue to have a permanent place on the committee, but its power and influence will be vastly reduced.

Additionally, nodes belonging to the Aleph Zero Foundation will begin charging slightly higher commission fees in order to incentivize nominators to nominate nodes belonging to the community.

As of December 17th 2024 the committee at any given time consists of only one AZF node and 13 community nodes.

Step 5

Finally, Aleph Zero will be decentralized from the network validation perspective, which means that both block production committee and finalization committee are rotated randomly within the set of all community validators, with one exception: AZF/Turing being chosen every session, due to practical concerns. The AlephZero Foundation still needs to monitor health of the finalization to be able to fix unlikely outages swiftly. This exception does not change the big picture, which is that it is the community which is now responsible for the AlephZero blockchain moving forward.