As an Aleo ambassador, I’m thrilled we hosted the first-ever Aleoverse Uncovered Twitter Space event to showcase the remarkable projects building the future of privacy on Aleo.

Bringing together ecosystem leaders like IZAR, PrivX, Leo Wallet, SuperBuffers, Mori’s Shell, and Aleo IOU for an insightful discussion was a milestone moment. For the first time, you heard directly from these teams on the bleeding edge of ZK innovation.

There were so many exciting revelations, roadmap teasers, and thoughtful perspectives shared during the event. I wanted to recap all the highlights so anyone who missed out can get a complete overview.

Here’s a comprehensive transcript of everything covered during this thrilling event.

Leo Wallet

Twitter: @theLeoWallet

1. Could you tell us a bit about your team first?

   My name is Barron, one of the founders and CEO of Demox Labs that behind the Leo wallet. And our team right now has 6 people, mostly MIT trained developers, we just love the feature, programmable privacy and we see Aleo has been the first market that helped make that a reality. So we are excited to help a number of people to get access to owners’ assets in a privacy manner that has never been cryptographically possible before.

2. As the only privacy wallet built for Aleo so far, would you share some insights regarding why it is so challenging and time-consuming to build a wallet on Aleo, what are some major obstacles you have to overcome compared with other wallets like Metamask?

   It’s a great question, we got this question a lot. It really comes down to how different Aleo is than other chains where on most chains, like Metamask on Ethereum or any other chains, everything lives in public state. So you can call a very simple API, just look it up yourself on what assets are owned by a specific account and addresses, which is why they are fully public and transparent, and completely auditable and you can’t really hide assets outside the public eyes. Aleo is encrypted from the ground up so every single transaction is encrypted. and that is great for the individual users because you don’t have to share your assets, your transactions. But it’s really difficult for the infrastructure building at this standpoint, you can’t just look at the chain and understand what a wallet owns, you have to programmatically decrypt all of the records on the entire chain to be certain that you know which asset belongs to which account. You can only do that if you have the private key, an encryption key for each public address that you’re searching for. So it’s a very difficult problem that you don’t have to face in another ecosystem, which is one of the benefits but also one of the drawbacks building on the encrypted chain.

3. You’ve recently launched Privacy Pride NFT collection, the first and native NFT collection on Aleo. Would you share with us the reasons why you want to launch this NFT in the first place and what is your future plan for the collection, will there be more benefits holding the NFT?

   Yes, we are very excited about the Privacy Pride NFT collection. Umm, we launched it for a number of reasons. We think NFTs are a fundamental part of an ecosystem, and we saw an opportunity to help set the standard for how they work and also make it really easy for anyone to launch their own NFT. So Privacy Pride, yes, is the first zk NFT on Aleo, but we also released documentation that lets people launch their own NFT collection in a very low code manner. Umm, and you can see the docs on art.privacypride.com. It links out to how people can launch their own. But for the collection itself, yeah, we are really excited. Not only are we huge fan of the art, but we’re planning to bring this through and minting it on mainnet giving the people who are part of the community like voting rights over how to use the treasury, like revenue share, future sales somethings like that. So we do have ideas for how we wanna improve the NFT collection over time, right now everything is on testnet, there’s no live Aleo token, and I wanna make that clear without any monetary tie to it. But we do see ourselves still were a privacy focused community through this visual identity, also NFTs provide a really strong technical template for doing more activities tied to identity. So what do I mean by that, there are ways where if we own an NFT without divulging the owner of the NFT, or which NFT you can prove authentication as part of a certain group and get an access to a certain website or content without having a username or password. Things like that, they are really repelling within the zk privacy ecosystem. So we’re gonna continue to build those out over time. And we have a lot of other really interesting ideas that benefit owners of them, and we’ve rewarded a lot of our community members so far, but I don’t wanna overpromise underdeliver, so I’ll just say that we have a lot in store for that collection over time.

4. Could you tell us what’s next for Demox Labs and the Leo wallet? Do you also help Aleo team in development?

   I’ll break this question up. We are spending our resources staying in the largest zk and privacy ecosystem, as much as possible. We really believe that this is the future of digital currencies and currency in general. And private ownership is fundamental to that, we wanna help everyone building in the space move forward. So some of the things on our roadmap, yes Leo wallet is our main product, and we wanna sure it works seamlessly on all the other projects, we want to help build out the whole Aleo ecosystem together so that we all can win. And I think that’s a fundamental part of early ecosystem development that we are all partners and make sure we can win together and draw more awareness in the space. So that’s one of the things, it’s like Leo Wallet continuously improving, everyone on this call is working on interesting projects, and all of them are supported from the functionality standpoint from the wallet because some of the things we talked about earlier, it’s just harder to do things like bring between public and private state, to show a lot of different variations and token types. So we’re going to support this over time and continue to support the wallet. We’ve also been working on the Privacy Pride NFT, other primitives for other people to build on top of the Aleo ecosystem. That does tie to the next question you asked around, do we help the Aleo team in development? We are an independent company but we spend a lot of time collaborating with the Aleo team and trying to work together to make sure that all sorts of building blocks are out there for new developers and builders there in the space. We definitely collaborate on projects and try to provide as much as possible, so that we can all be successful together. But we’re an independent company.

IZAR

Twitter: @IZAR_Protocol

1. By leveraging the power of ZKP, and the native support of Aleo blockchain, how is IZAR different from other existing cross-chain protocols? What makes you stand out and ensure security since we’ve seen a few major hacker attacks on leading bridges recently that resulted in significant financial lost?

   We aim to solve the centralization problems that all other cross-chain protocols currently face. Recent hacks to Multichain and Poly Bridge can be seen as a direct consequence of centralization. Existing bridges are either controlled by only a few validators or disguised to be decentralized by MPC. However, MPC relies on TEE, which is more suitable for alliance blockchains instead of public blockchains.

   We decided to take a fundamentally different approach to tackle this problem. Instead of MPC and TEE, we will use zkSNARKs for privacy and security. This allows us to build a truly decentralized bridge with sufficient validators to safeguard the system. In addition, privacy is becoming increasingly important. Aleo's native support for privacy makes it much more fluent for building private cross-chain capabilities. By leveraging Aleo's unique capabilities, we can create a cross-chain protocol that finally solves the centralization issues that have plagued other solutions.

2. The total transactions on IZAR Genesis testnet has surpassed 10k, and you’ve announced that there will be Odyssey Crusader NFTs releasing to celebrate this, would you tell us more about that?

   we’re very excited to share that the total cross-chain transaction on IZAR hit a whopping 10k last weekend, all thanks to our amazing community members who showed so much love and enthusiasm. We quickly took a snapshot of the addresses at that milestone and decided to reward these rockstar contributors with 500 Odyssey Crusader NFTs.

   Now, here’s the cool part - all the testers who played a part in making this milestone a reality will be eligible for the free mint in the coming weeks. We’re creating a brand-new page on IZAR exclusively for whitelisted users to mint their our Crusader NFTs, and you’ll find it right when it’s out.

   This is just one step in our epic Odyssey journey, and if you’ve been following our blog, you’re probably familiar with the adventure we’re on. Once we surpass the 10k mark in total addresses which is a pretty tough challenge for us, we’ll drop the ultimate Legendary Odyssey NFT. But there definitely will be some requirements to snag that ultimate NFT, so keep an eye out for updates.

3. I’ve noticed that you’ve recently won the first place on ETHShanghai hackathon main track and last night I saw you won another prize on Linea track. So congratulations. I assume there must be venture capital firms coming for you, I was wondering are you already in touch with them and what is your plan for now?

   Thank you! We are thrilled about the reward. In fact, we have had several venture capital firms reaching out to us recently, offering their support and assistance. While we are considering financing options, our primary focus at the moment is still on the development of our project. Implementing zkSNARK and governance are both time-consuming and come with their own set of challenges. Overcoming these obstacles is crucial for us to position IZAR as a strong competitor in the market.

PrivX

Twitter: @PrivExchange

1. As the first order book DEX on Aleo enabling anonymous trading, how does PrivX protect user identities and trading activity? And what additional privacy features can traders expect from PrivX vs. traditional DEXs?

   PrivX is a cutting-edge, decentralized platform that values user privacy. With no KYC or account verification necessary, users can seamlessly use Web3 wallets to log in and access our services. Trade confidently on PrivX exchange without the need to disclose personal information. Our platform empowers users with the option to conceal their identity and transaction details, ensuring utmost privacy.

   Privx does not hold assets and grants users full control of crypto investments. Users are free from the risk of asset freezing. Users can also enjoy predictably low gas costs on the Aleo network, effectively avoiding the high gas fee scenarios compared to other platforms.

   PrivX leverages Aleo's ZEXE protocol to fulfill two primary objectives: efficient validation and user privacy protection. The efficient validation mechanism employs off-chain computing techniques to verify transactions on-chain, thereby enhancing the system's overall performance. Moreover, PrivX's cutting-edge technology offers selective privacy protection for users and transaction data, surpassing the capabilities of ZCash's privacy protocols. Moving forward, PrivX plans to incorporate zkCloud's off-chain and trustless computing, facilitating contract computations off-chain and generating proofs on-chain. This strategy will optimize computing performance and strengthen security measures while preserving user privacy.

2. What is your major focus at the moment, are there any new plans you would like to share with us?

   As Aleo's on-chain infrastructure is currently under development, PrivX employs an off-chain server for order matching during test-net phases. As Aleo progresses, PrivX will integrate order matching into on-chain smart contracts, fostering a fully decentralized service supporting the entire life cycle of placing, matching, and fulfilling orders. In the future, with Aleo's decentralized privacy computing (DPC) and proxy ZKP computing model, PrivX will further decrease transaction computation and on-chain time, achieving faster transaction speed and improved availability.

   We will also keep on developing new features such as liquidity incentives, margin trading, derivatives trading, etc. in the future once corresponding prerequisites are supported by Aleo’s infrastructure and environment.

   On the other hand, currently, on the Aleo platform, there lacks an ARC standard for user-defined tokens similar to ERC-20. As this is an essential precondition for not only Privx but also other Defi projects, we are also working on promoting such an ARC-20 standard around the Aleo community.

   We noticed that there already some discussions about fungible token standards by Leo wallet team members in the ARC repo, where both teams seem to share similar ideas. We are curious about the Leo wallet team's attitude toward ARC-20, whether you are working or have any future plans upon this standard. It would be very appreciated if we can cooperate to propose a feasible token standard for all communities. Hi Barron could you share some clues? Thx!

   Barron of the Leo wallet replied: Yeah we’re definitely working on it, I believe there’s an arc that is up for discussion. So we have the token standard for ERC 721, the NFT, we even published an arc for the ERC20 equivalent, I think there’s one that has a lot of comments on it, which is Aleo’s process for defining changes of the protocol. My understanding was like the bigger blocker is how the account and programs can really call on one another yet, which is also something we’ve been working on with the Aleo team to implement.

Barron of the Leo wallet replied: Yeah we’re definitely working on it, I believe there’s an arc that is up for discussion. So we have the token standard for ERC 721, the NFT, we even published an arc for the ERC20 equivalent, I think there’s one that has a lot of comments on it, which is Aleo’s process for defining changes of the protocol. My understanding was like the bigger blocker is how the account and programs can really call on one another yet, which is also something we’ve been working on with the Aleo team to implement.

SuperBuffers

Twitter: @superbuffers

1. Would you briefly explain how SuperBuffers can improve the execution speed for applications built on Aleo, as many of us don’t quite understand the framework and the design? Maybe help us get to know this in simple words?

   SuperBuffers is a layer2 middleware between decentralized applications and layer1 chain, such as Aleo. Previously, applications need to generate transactions, including requests and zero-knowledge proofs. With SuperBuffers, requests are generated by users in the web3 application. SuperBuffers receives the requests and puts these requests into a sequencer in time order. SuperBuffers responds to the application immediately and then generates proofs for the user requests. Transactions will be recorded on the chain eventually. You can go to our blog and Github to find more details.

2. So what do say about the biggest advantage of SuperBuffers?

   To the best of our knowledge, SuperBuffers is the first privacy-preserving Aleo sequencer with high throughput and strong security. It also has some excellent advantages, for example, users can delegate heavy computation to a device with powerful computation resources. Users can query the state of their own requests at any time. Besides, SuperBuffers inherits the privacy-preserving feature of Aleo.

3. Could you share about your current progress as it certainly sounds like a demanding job?

   Now, we use a well-known game called Battleship to show how SuperBuffers speeds up Web3 applications. We are verifying the feasibility of our high-level idea. In the next phase, we will prevent malicious behavior of centralized sequencers such as not sorting the requests in time order, or some requests are not inserted into the queue. We will also go on general component development. These are some recent plans. In the future, we want to make SuperBuffers as decentralized, with strong privacy sequencers.

4. As we all know, Aleo is a chain which can protect the privacy of users. So, what efforts has SuperBuffers made in privacy protection, and what plans are there in the future?

   At present, we are trying to build SuperBuffers as a centralized trustworthy sequencer. We can substitute for generating heavy proofs without leaking users’ private keys and detect some malicious behaviors. However, the user should give its plain witness to the centralized sequencer, hence it leaks information about the user's witness. In the future, we plan to build decentralized, strong privacy sequencers. In more detail, when expanding to multiple sequencers, the sharding technology can be used to realize the delegated calculation of zk. Every sequencer can get part of the messages not whole. Only a certain number of shards collected by the sequencers can restore the user's witness, which can effectively guarantee the user's privacy.

Mori’s Shell

Twitter: @MorisShell

1. Can you provide an introduction to Mori and explain what kind of game it is? What makes Mori special out there in the market?

   Mori is an AI training game that utilizes a unique approach to teach and train artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional methods that rely on vast amounts of labeled data, Mori gamifies the AI training process, making it engaging and interactive for users. Players of Mori are actively involved in training AI models while playing the game. Through their actions and decisions, they contribute to the development and improvement of AI algorithms.

   At Mori's Shell in Aleo-Uniland, every planet contains valuable nutrients, waiting for brave explorers to discover. The acquisition of nutrients is aimed at rewarding explorers who successfully challenge AI Mori. In this cosmic adventure, you can not only experience the challenge and fun of Othello but also have the opportunity to participate in this journey of wisdom while making every move. We use Aleo ZK privacy blockchain technology to ensure your privacy and the privacy of other explorers in the decision-making process and share the rich nutrients of the Genesis planet.

   Visit our website: https://morishell.io

2. How do you integrate Mori into Aleo, and why privacy matter in building this game?

   Aleo is a blockchain platform that strongly emphasizes privacy technologies. When Mori integrates with Aleo, we make great changes to the original game rules, adding the concept of anonymity to every step of the user in the game and packaging it with a more complex game background story. Through these changes, I think that Mors gains access to the advanced privacy features offered by the Aleo network:

   Enhanced Privacy: Aleo's privacy-focused technology ensures that the data generated and used within Mori remains confidential and secure. This is particularly important since AI training often involves sensitive and personal information.

   Decentralization: Aleo ensures that the AI training process is distributed across a network of nodes, making it more resistant to central control and manipulation.

   Transparent Consensus: Aleo's consensus mechanisms ensure that AI training results are achieved through a fair and transparent process. This transparency is vital to maintaining trust among users and stakeholders.

   Immutable Records: All AI training activities and decisions are recorded on the Aleo blockchain, creating an immutable trail of the training process. This auditability can be essential for accountability and validation.

   By combining Mori's unique gamified AI training approach with Aleo's privacy-centric blockchain technology, the resulting ecosystem provides a secure, transparent, and community-driven platform for training AI models while safeguarding users' data and preserving their privacy. This integration could have significant implications for advancing AI technology and its responsible use in various industries.

Aleo IOU

Twitter: @AleoIOU

1. Tell us about Aleo IOU and what opportunities does Aleo IOU demonstrate for financial agreements, loans, etc. requiring privacy?

   Aleoiou is the peer-to-peer lending protocol. What we try to do is utilize the zero-knowledge proof to facilitate encrypted and secure transactions. So basically we are moving a pretty common real-life scenario on-chain which is borrowing money from an acquaintance. So when you borrow money from people you know in real life, most of the case, you would not be asked for any collateral simply writing a lending note will work. So we are trying to mimic this procedure on the chain.

   With zero-knowledge proof in play, customers can comfortably share their real-world ID on the chain and tie them to a single wallet in an anonymous way. And all the potentially sensitive financial information including lending amount, lending rate, due time, etc. will only be disclosed with the involved parties’ permission.

   And then we believe this will highly benefit the cross-border transaction to largely mitigate the legislation issue.

2. Would you share your future plans with us? What are some other features we will see on Aleo IOU?

   So I will start by talking about two general types of lending on chain. One is the over-collateralized lending protocol like aave or compound on Ethereum. It requires the borrower to overcollateralize the cryptocurrency so that in the case of a default, the borrower’s assets will be liquidated in order to pay back the loan. This type of lending can be done in a fully decentralized way it doesn’t require more of the borrowers’ personal info. But the drawback is obviously, it needs to be over-collateralized.

   And another type of lending is simply undercollaterilzed, so usually it requires some sort of centralized KYC procedure or maybe some other on-chain transaction history data to serve as credit assessment. So it doesn’t require over collateralize but the loophole is that it kind of goes against the spirit of decentralization.

   What we try to do is that we try to solve this contradiction. With the help of zero-knowledge proof, both lenders and borrowers can prove the truth of their identification without disclosing any specific details. So that they can comfortably share their real-world ID and tie them to a single wallet in an anonymous way.

   Right now ALEO IOU is just a minimum viable prototype. AND the lender and borrower matching procedure is happening off-chain and done manually. It is pretty time-consuming and low efficiency so in the future we would like to implement the automatically matching feature so that the service will be more inclusive and efficient.

   Also, we would like to cooperate with some KYC providers, again the purpose is to make the service more inclusive and equitable.

   IN THE LONG TERM, we also like to add the over-collateral functionality, so users who don’t want to go through the KYC procedure can have the option to do the transaction in a fully decentralized way without disclosing any personal information.

The event offered incredible access to the teams building the next generation of privacy applications on Aleo. Make sure to follow all the projects for updates as they continue their development!

Follow me on Twitter @JustinBao_