Aleo Community: 2021 Year in Review

Since Aleo’s inception we’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth in the size and scope of our open-source community. In particular, 2021 had some of the most pivotal developments to the overall ecosystem. Let’s take a look back at some of our biggest developments:

Discord

At the start of 2021 we launched the official Aleo Discord server. Over that period of time we’ve gone from having only a few hundred community members to over 11,700. More importantly, more than one-third of those members are active on a daily basis writing messages and interacting with other community members. The Discord is currently undergoing a transformation and new features will be introduced in the new year.

Zero-Knowledge Salons, Engineering Standups & Community Calls

We started hosting live voice sessions every Monday on the Aleo Discord where the community talks about different topics in the zero-knowledge cryptography space. These sessions have been a great way for us to engage with the community and have open discussions about Aleo and the broader privacy landscape in crypto. We also started hosting regular public engineering standups for snarkOS and Leo as well as bi-monthly community calls. These have been great opportunities to provide community members with real-time updates on the project. All recording of these calls can be found on our YouTube channel.

Aleo Setup Ceremony - Phase 1

As a prerequisite to launching mainnet, Aleo completed Phase 1 of our setup ceremony. The purpose of this ceremony was to generate the parameters for the zkSNARKs used in Aleo and to ensure that our system remains fully secure, decentralized, and permissionless. We invited community members to help generate these parameters by participating in the ceremony and as of the end of 2021 we had over 2,100 unique contributions. This is the most contributions of any setup ceremony to date! Next year we plan to have Phase 2 of the setup ceremony available for more individuals to contribute.

Looking Forward ~ 2022

In addition to the many accomplishments from this past year, there are a number of new programs and initiatives planned for 2022 to accelerate the growth of the Aleo ecosystem and open-source community. Some of these plans include the following:

Ambassadors Program

To encourage the expansion of our ecosystem we will be launching an ambassadors program. The program is designed to provide both technical and non-technical community members with the opportunity to evangelize the project, create content and develop other resources. Ambassadors will be recognized within our community and incentivized with rewards.

Community Grants Program

In June of 2021 Aleo launched its initial grants program. Since that period of time we’ve had the privilege of working with many incredible teams. To date we’ve received over 60 applications and have approved a number of those for further development. In the new year we plan to expand this program and ramp up the number of active grants. We will have both pre-defined grant proposals as well as offer the ability for people to come up with their own unique ideas.

Feature Bounties Program

One major aspect of Aleo is it’s domain-specific language & compiler, Leo. To encourage the continued development of Leo we launched a feature bounties program wherein community members can build out new features in Leo and claim a bounty. Although this began in 2021 we are going to make this a more formalized program and encourage more contributions.

Leo Programming Contests

We also want to help people learn Leo by introducing programming contests. The idea of these contests is to introduce a coding challenges to users and see who can design the best solutions. There will be a leaderboard where people can rack up points for their contributions as well as rewards for the top submissions. We hope that active participation in these contests will help our engineering teams further optimize the language.

Community Office Hours

Starting in the new year we would like to hold office hours wherein individuals can speak with core team engineers and other community members about the various topics pertaining to the Aleo ecosystem and software stack. Our first office hours will take place during the second half of the incentivized testnet and focus on helping people understand how they can optimize their mining setups to be as effective as possible at mining blocks.

Stay Connected with Aleo

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AleoHQ

Join the conversation on Discord: https://aleo.org/discord

View our code on GitHub: https://github.com/AleoHQ

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AleoHQ

Check out our community wiki: https://aleo.org/community/wiki