After the mainnet went live, Aleo failed to gain community recognition and instead faced a lot of skepticism on social media, especially from miners. Many users on social media have expressed that this is another case of a "king" turning into a "fallen king" failure.
By Frank, PANews
As a star project with a financing of over 200 million US dollars, Aleo's progress has always been highly anticipated. On September 18, 2024, Aleo's mainnet officially went live, and the token economy situation was finally disclosed. However, after the mainnet went live, Aleo failed to gain community recognition and instead faced a lot of skepticism on social media, especially from miners. Many users on social media have expressed that this is another case of a "king" turning into a "fallen king" failure.
A Star-Studded Project with Buffs
Established in 2019, Aleo proposed from the beginning to build a privacy-protecting, permissionless, and programmable platform. The main technologies mentioned in the official introduction include succinct proof of work (PoSW), Leo language, AleoBFT, Varuna, and other content. These technical aspects mainly build a Layer 1 blockchain network with privacy protection at its core, using zero-knowledge proof technology combined with POW, POS, and AleoBFT consensus mechanisms. From a comprehensive perspective of the technical features, Aleo appears to be more like a Layer 1 blockchain network that integrates the consensus mechanisms of Ethereum and Solana, while also benefiting from zero-knowledge technology.
The background of the Aleo founding team members is also standard academic, with the main members coming from the University of California, Berkeley, and having previously worked at well-known Silicon Valley giants such as a16z, Coinbase, or Amazon. The star-studded team and innovative concepts have made Aleo's financing smooth sailing. In 2021, it received a Series A financing of 28 million US dollars, and in 2022, it completed a Series B financing of 200 million US dollars, with a valuation reaching 14.5 billion US dollars. The lineup of investors also includes well-known institutions such as a16z, SoftBank, Kora, and Coinbase.
However, the development progress of the Aleo team seems to be somewhat sluggish. The final version of the testnet was not launched until May 2024, and it had already announced the launch of the mainnet in 2023, but the planned mainnet release in January 2024 was delayed until September. In this process, Aleo missed out on the project's rise in the early stages of this bull market, causing early participants and miners waiting for rewards to suffer.
It can be said that whether from the team background, technical concepts, or investor lineup, Aleo is a star-studded project. If it were not for the slow speed of going live, it might have already joined the ranks of top-tier new public chains.
Since the official data platform of Aleo does not display specific wallet addresses and daily transaction details, the specific ecological activity of Aleo cannot be directly verified through data. It can only be speculated about the development of Aleo's ecology through some other data.
The Puzzle wallet is the most called program on Aleo. On September 19, the number of times Puzzle was called exceeded 10,000, achieving explosive growth. From the timeline, this may be due to Aleo announcing on September 18 that tokens could be claimed through the Puzzle wallet. Before this, the number of times a program on Aleo was called in a single day did not exceed 100. According to Puzzle's official publicity, the wallet currently has over 30,000 users.
According to Aleo founder Alex Pruden's statement on social media celebrating the launch of the mainnet, "This achievement would not have been possible without the efforts of dozens of employees, hundreds of ambassadors, and thousands of community members." Based on the above data, the ecological activity of Aleo is not particularly high. However, the number of projects in the Aleo ecosystem is still considerable. As of now, there are over 50 projects in the Aleo ecosystem.
Airdrop Lockup, Price Plunge Inflicts Double Blow on Miners
Although the mainnet did not go live for a long time, Aleo's financing of over 200 million US dollars was still seen as a potential stock by various mining studios and miner groups. Well-known mining pools such as Bitmain and F2Pool also launched mining services for Aleo test coins early on. Therefore, many miners also invested their computing power in pre-mining.
According to the official Aleo browser, on September 5, the Aleo mainnet had already gone live, but the official announcement was not made. Some miners who sensed the business opportunity began to deploy mining. The initially produced tokens were traded off the market at a price close to 9 US dollars, and the official announcement of the mainnet going live was not made until September 18. This operation also triggered a lot of suspicion in the community, with some people believing that the official was pre-mining tokens during this time or leaving pre-mining time for VCs.
A miner who participated in early mining of Aleo told PANews that because they could not be sure whether the tokens they mined would be recognized by the official, they did not dare to deploy too much computing power. However, there were already many merchants within the community buying Aleo tokens off the market in early September, with prices around 9 US dollars. Based on the price calculation of 1.5 tokens produced per day by a 4090, the daily income was about 13.5 US dollars, and it would take about 158 days to recoup the investment in the graphics card. If the price of Aleo rose to 20 US dollars, the graphics card investment could potentially be recouped within three months. Therefore, the expected returns of Aleo made many miners full of anticipation.
However, this situation underwent a dramatic change after the official announcement of the token economy on September 16. According to Aleo, the initial supply of Aleo tokens reached 1.5 billion, and it will increase to 2.6 billion over the next ten years through mining activities. Based on this 9 US dollar price, Aleo's initial market value would reach 13.5 billion US dollars, which would mean that Aleo could become one of the top ten cryptocurrency projects, surpassing long-established public chain tokens such as TRON and ADA.
For a project with only tens of thousands of addresses in its ecosystem, this market value expectation is obviously too high. Therefore, Aleo's price has experienced a sharp drop since the announcement of the token economy, continuously falling to 3.4 US dollars. As of September 20, Aleo's market value is about 5 billion US dollars, which also ranks it among the top 20 in cryptocurrency market value.
However, the sudden price plunge has sharply reduced miner income, and including costs such as electricity and network, the payback period may be extended to 10 years.
In addition, for early miners participating in the testnet, they will receive incentives from Aleo. According to the official introduction, 34% of Aleo tokens will be used for early supporter rewards. However, this reward cannot be cashed out immediately. The official policy states that both US and non-US users have a one-year lock-up period for their rewards. This news has once again silently dealt a blow to early miners eager to recoup their costs from the official.
Interestingly, Aleo, with the vision of building a privacy-first blockchain, stated during the token airdrop that all users need to complete KYC and require users applying for the airdrop to upload identification documents, proof of address, and a selfie. This requirement has also sparked strong dissatisfaction within the community.
Capital Recouping First? Continuous Community Doubts
According to the latest information from Aleo, becoming a mainnet validator requires at least 10 million Aleo tokens, a capital scale and token amount that are almost impossible for most ordinary users to achieve (there may not be so many circulating tokens in the early market). Some users have noticed that when the Aleo mainnet went live, there were already 16 validators running, most of which were early investors.
Although the tokens of investors are also subject to a one-year lock-up, they can directly convert the locked tokens into staking tokens for validators. At the same time, the daily reward tokens for staking do not have a lock-up period and can be circulated at any time.
As of September 20, the data shows that the most validators have received over 1.1 million Aleo tokens, while the least validators have received over 270,000 tokens. Among the validators, the majority are associated with investors or project-related organizations such as Coinbase, unit410, and the Aleo Foundation.
Many community users believe that this operation by the project side is aimed at allowing capital to recoup first, and then letting retail investors take over the mined tokens. Meanwhile, self-funded miners have to consider the payback period for costs such as electricity and equipment.
Looking at the changes in mining income, before the announcement of the token economy, Aleo's mining difficulty was exponentially increasing, but after the announcement of the token economy, perhaps due to many miners exiting, the mining difficulty began to decrease.
On social media, the evaluation of Aleo has shifted from recommendation to skepticism. Twitter user @alexlizeros stated: "From the failure-level project ALEO, we can see that sometimes a big project does not bring profits, but instead brings greater losses!" KOL @Supervellear, after posting a tweet questioning Aleo, was blocked by Aleo founder Alex Pruden on social media. @alexlizeros listed doubts about Aleo's mainnet delay, airdrop lockup, and overvaluation, and concluded: "When you don't know where the liquidity comes from, you are the liquidity."
As of now, the official response from Aleo to the community's many doubts has not been provided. However, from the current trend on social media and the performance of the token, Aleo may need to provide a more reasonable explanation and show more practical sincerity in order to regain market confidence.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
