Aleo FireSide Newspaper #15 (English)

The publication was prepared by: Gena | GG, rykovka, RoyHansen, AnnaB, Rufat and Sula

Design: Tarantino and Dinaaaaa666

Hello, dear readers of the Aleo Fireside Newspaper! We are pleased to welcome you to the pages of our newspaper. In the 15th issue, we have prepared a lot of interesting materials for you that will help you stay up to date with the latest news and events in the Aleo project. In this issue, you will learn about all the latest updates in the community. We will share details about the recent community call and the topics discussed there. Moreover, we conducted an exciting interview with a well-known community member who has extensive experience in game development and has recently shifted their focus to crypto. We hope that everyone will find plenty of useful and relevant information in this issue. So, let’s begin!

On 6/06, an ecosystem update was released:

· SnarkOS, SnarkVM, and the Leo programming language have been updated.

· The Aleo team invites community members to fill out a form to organize monthly IRL meetups.

· Ambassador Program:

- The application form for the 5th round of the Ambassador Program is now closed.

- The 6th round of the Ambassador Program will open on July 7th.

· The Bug Bounty Program with rewards for finding errors in Aleo has been launched.

· The Deployment Incentives Program for deploying applications on Aleo has been launched.

You can ask your questions in the 🔬┃testnet3-support channel or fill out the form. More details can be found in the blog post.

· ALEO Tooling & Infrastructure Grants Program for developers has been launched. Read more details in the blog post.

· Nominate Alex Pruden to speak at #Mainnet2023 because AI needs accountability. Vote through the link

· The next IRL event will take place in Pasadena, California, on 8–9 June.

- https://lu.ma/zkgames3xp on June 8th

- https://lu.ma/zgames3xp2 on June 9th

· The “Privacy Playlist” Music Contest has been launched. Find contest details in zkMusic Contest.

On Wednesday 7/06, the weekly Aleo community call was held, hosted as usual by the head of the community, Viviane Ford. During the meeting, she noted that the Aleo Discord server already has 92,000 members, and once it reaches 100,000 participants, the team will do something fun and unique! Viviane also shared that the Aleo team will be attending numerous events in various countries and cities, such as Vietnam, Los Angeles, Oxford, and Paris on July 20th. Community events will also take place in Nigeria, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and San Francisco. All the events are marked on the community calendar so if you are nearby consider attending them. It’s possible that certain ambassadors will be selected as official representatives of their countries.

Regarding the ambassador program, Viviane mentioned that she will send letters with new KYC links to all the selected candidates.

Moreover, there was an announcement about the creation of a community blog featuring the best content, which will be released monthly. Maestros, who are responsible for checking and evaluating the content, will select the works for this blog. If you do not want the Aleo team to use your content, please remember to leave a message about it..

It’s also worth mentioning that 50 validators have been selected for the Testnet, and a dedicated channel will be created for them to discuss their questions and concerns.

On Wednesday, 7/06, there was a message issued by the head of the community, Viviane Ford, regarding scammers who advertise and sell Aleo mining packages.

The official team statement is as follows: “there are companies that are advertising and selling Aleo mining packages through their websites. They have organized events to promote their offerings and attract potential customers. Additionally, they are posting their “supposed” connections to Aleo. WE HAVE NO AFFILIATION WITH THESE GROUPS AND WE DO NOT CONDONE WHAT THEY ARE DOING. On our system, we do not do mining. We do proving. As anyone who followed the Discord during Testnet 3 knows, there are no rewards for provers participating in Testnet 3 Phase III (which we are currently in).”

Beware of scammers and only follow official information from the team.

02.06

Viv#3868

Just a reminder that KYC is ON PAUSE! If you received an email and were not able to complete it, you’re fine. We’re working with the provider to fix the issue. Basically, when it asked for address verification, for some reasons, WithPersona rejected all addiitional uploads. We’ll let you all know what the gameplan is ASAP, so sorry for the delay

06.06

nodg#4210 (for ambassadors only)

If you see anyone maliciously using Aleo brand, please let us know

Thanks to everyone creating content for Aleo

Today, we have a very interesting community member as our guest who has been doing tremendous work. Please welcome the_liolik#3786 a guy with 8 years of experience in the game development industry, having held various positions ranging from in-game economy designer to financial director.

the_liolik, hello! On behalf of our entire newspaper team, I would like to welcome you and congratulate you on successfully passing the selection process and becoming an ambassador for the project. We are thrilled to have you as part of our ambassador team.

I understand that this question may seem trivial, but it’s not every day that we get to interact with someone who has such a rich life and professional experience. I have briefly described it in the introduction, but we would love to hear more details from you. Could you tell us about what you were doing before joining Aleo and the crypto space in general?

Hello, everyone! First and foremost, I want to express my gratitude for inviting me and for the quality approach to this interview and the newspaper as a whole. You are doing an amazing job! And this is not just politeness but genuine observation.

A little about myself.

My name is Alexey, I’m 38 years old, and I’m from Kyiv. I have a beautiful wife and two children. I’ve been involved in cryptocurrency since 2017, so I consider myself an “old one” in this regard.

As for my journey, it all started with getting married. I believe

that in every man’s life, there comes a moment when he wants to do one of two things:

a) Open his own bar.

b) Start his own business.

I didn’t open a bar, but after getting married, I decided to try my hand at starting my own business. I realized that in a year or two, the chaos around raising children would begin, and it would be difficult to give up a stable position Finance Director in one of Ukraine’s top companies.

So, 8 years ago, I ventured into the game development industry as a partner, marketer, analyst, and game designer — basically, a “a bit of somehow”

During these years, I’ve had a lot of activity, and now I left back around 15 cross-platform applications with varying degrees of ownership. I’ve also had three successful startups, and I’m currently working on one with a ready MVP, aiming for a release by the end of the year.

What prompted you to get involved in studying and developing cryptocurrency? Did you see any prospects in this field or did you simply decide to try something new for yourself? Why did you choose to join Aleo?

- As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been involved in crypto since 2017, and I’ve experienced a lot and seen various things. Crypto has been and still is my hobby. Crypto is a lifestyle, it’s a life change, it’s a challenge. So, crypto has been a part of my life for a long time, and as long as there are cool memes, informality, and joking in the crypto world, I will be a part of it.

Regarding development, I always wanted to try myself in this field, but somehow the opportunity never came up. Now the situation has unfolded in such a way that:

a) I see a certain systemic problem with developers in the crypto industry.

b) I have the opportunity to spend 3–6 months on another attempt, to dive deep into an interesting topic for me.

Why Aleo?

a) Aleo is literally pioneers in their field with a Legendary Team.

b) In my opinion, Aleo show up a clear problem with developers in the industry.

c) The presence of an ambassador program, as it may compensate for the time I spend on learning. In other words, I saw a simple win-win situation here.

Aleo is my first experience with ambassador programs.

Many people have seen your Aleo Quiz application (https://quiz.aleo.build/). But for those who haven’t seen it for various reasons, please tell us more about it. What is this application, and how does it work? Was it developed mainly for practice and experiments, or is there any planned further development?

-Honestly, I’m not very proud of this application as an application itself. I’m more proud of the fact that I created it with only 2–3 months of coding experience.

The main idea of Quiz Game is to demonstrate that you can and should build on Aleo regardless of your skills and experience. This application is part of my development portal at https://www.aleo.build/, and therefore, the main concept is to provide documentation and serve as an example of developing a DApp with fully open-source code, starting from the smart contract and ending with the frontend.

There are no plans for further development for the application, but I will maintain it in a working state so that this development example is not just theoretical. Because due to constant updates and resets, it can be quite resource-intensive to keep the application running smoothly.

In our private conversation, you mentioned that you are currently working on another application for Aleo in the field of authentication. It’s a very interesting topic. Could you share some details with our readers?

- I came up with this idea after a tweet from Aleo about DID. In general, it will be a module that can be easily integrated into any other application, and it will be responsible for user authentication and identification.

I want to make it as lightweight and unobtrusive in integration as possible. The use case is simple:

· If you want your application to be used only by verified users, you can add a few lines of code and you will get it.

· If you don’t want to deal with identity providers, etc., you can add a few lines of code and you will get it.

· If you don’t want your personal data to show up on the black market or be used without your permission, you can store them on the Aleo blockchain.

Of course, all of this is currently just discussions with an unfinished design document (read: technical specification), but I have a plan, and I will follow it.

How difficult, in your personal opinion, is the work of an (abstract) developer in the crypto field compared to a (again, abstract) developer in game development? How do they differ?

- In my view, the key aspect is the entry barrier. For instance, in game development, there are countless cool tools available for development, including manuals, and the entire field is shifting towards Unity, Unreal Engine, etc.

Finding a game developer is not that hard task, whereas crypto developers will watch you as an employer quite flirting.

However, this is a double-edged sword. Despite the higher entry barrier in the crypto field, it generously rewards you, and the chances of self-realization are significantly higher.

In my opinion, crypto is ideal for aspiring beginner developers since it is much easier to monetize one’s knowledge. It surprises me greatly that I only recently noticed this.

Essentially, in summary, this is the systemic issue I mentioned earlier, which has resulted in this imbalance.

That’s why in the following months, I will try to realize myself in this direction.

What perspective do you see for ZKP technology in general, and Aleo in particular?

I won’t describe it in detail here but will leave a quote from a cool guy Evan Marshall (CTO Leo Wallet / Demox Labs):
“AI dramatically increases the need for security in all digital systems. Exploits will write and deploy themselves. Governments will be forced to issue key pairs as identities.

Cryptography will explode as math is our only safety net against AGI.”

https://twitter.com/CoralRelief/status/1664155302915358720

Also, you mentioned the idea to organize a Basecamp for beginner developers on Aleo. Could you please tell me more about it?

- Actually, this idea is also quite evident to me, and it finally took shape after the announcement of Developer Incentives because I strongly disagree with Aleo’s approach to this initiative because, in my opinion, their approach to reward distribution is like trying to build a skyscraper without having foundation.

I understand that there may be things I don’t know, unseen pitfalls, and a lack of knowledge. It may sound somewhat pathetic and absurd when a noname guy from Discord criticizing guys who are building a project with a valuation of 1 billion+, BUT that doesn’t negate the fact that I’m committed to expressing my opinion directly)

So, the essence of Basecamp is simple. It’s about building a foundation with beginner developers, starting from my level and higher. It’s like a sales funnel, but for developers. There are many at the bottom, a decent number in the middle, and a few at the top.

If we go a bit deeper, it’s like an express course where anyone who goes through a relatively short program will acquire practical knowledge of how everything works, how to use it, what it’s for, why it matters, and other relevant aspects.

I have thoroughly researched this matter, explored several excellent programs and options, and come to the conclusion that it could be extremely cool! Moreover, these programs (courses) have a wonderful feature that with the right approach they sort of building themselves. Each cohort adds a lot of material for the next batch of students. Therefore, graduates from batch 5 will have much higher skills than that of batch 2.

Thus having a couple of developers coming out of Basecamp each month (even if they are beginners) would be immensely valuable, in my opinion.

As for the implementation, it is still an open question. Since I plan to participate in Developer Incentives, I will return to developing this direction after the completion of that initiative. So even in the case of a total loss in Developer Incentives, my work on https://www.aleo.build/will still be useful for the future Basecamp.

Sorry for the long explanation, but I wanted to make the essence clear.

Thank you again for inviting me for the interview!

P.S. I hope that when I’m older, I’ll be reading your newspaper in print, sitting by the fireplace, and telling my grandchildren that their grandpa was quite wow! Peace to all!

We would like to thank the_liolik#3786 for this fascinating interview and ask our readers to support him by following his social media accounts:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_liolik

GitHub: https://github.com/liolikus

This participant’s social media accounts are definitely worth following :)

07.06

Vladyslav | Validatrium#8664

what is the main criterion for selecting a validator for the mainnet? Will the requirements for the node be the same as in phase 3 of the testnet? How to calculate the approximate amount of profit of an Aleo network validator?

budovskiy#4624

There are no such details at the moment. The team is focused on developing all the necessary infrastructure for the consensus mechanism. Stay tuned for announcements.

07.06

Peter张#2518

is it true that we saw in the important notice Viv released today that provers and verifiers will have no incentive in TestNet 3 Phase 3? Does this go against the roadmap?

budovskiy#4624

There is no such node as verifiers. Provers had awards in Phase 2, there are currently no rewards for Provers. Now there are rewards for initiatives such as Deploy & Execute and Bug Bounty. Activities for validators are planned, but there is no exact information yet. Stay tuned for announcements.

06.06

LilanGray#7692

There was some talk about converting tokens from the test network

budovskiy#4624

Testnet tokens will not be converted to mainnet. This only applies to incentivized phases and rewards that provers have earned.