Aleph Zero: 2021 in Review

What started as an idea for a new consensus protocol back in early 2018, has now grown into a team of over 30 talented individuals and a community of over 50’000 people. 

At the beginning of the year, we were closing our seed round of $2.9 million and setting the foundations for team growth that was to happen over the following months. Until January 2021, the project has been largely bootstrapped by the co-founders, families, and friends, as well as profits generated from other activities. 

Mainnet Launched, Fundraise Secured

2021 has been a groundbreaking year for all of us involved with Aleph Zero. By Autumn, we’ve successfully closed total funding of $15 million and launched the first iteration of mainnet that boasts our original, peer-reviewed consensus protocol integrated with a customized Substrate stack. Technologically, we’re extremely proud of the subsecond latency our development team managed to achieve. 

None of that would have been possible without the vast support we’ve received from all around. Starting with all our families—who continue to be extremely patient with long hours spent on our work—through our friends, we can’t say “thank you” enough. 

The Best Community We Could’ve Asked For

Just as importantly, we have incredible admiration for our community. The website traffic on alephzero.org alone has grown up to 35x compared to Google Analytics reports from January. Our Twitter presence went up from 1K followers generating 4.5K impressions to a stunning ~40K followers and 1.7M impressions. Profile visits went up from around 1K to almost a million, and the vast majority of that traffic has been organic. Our main Telegram group now has over 14K members, and our community established numerous international communities that are being run by their own accord. Discord, which will become our priority in 2022, now consists of over 4K members. We’ve been featured in a variety of industry media such as Blockworks, NewsBTC, Hackernoon, Bankless Times, or Forkast, among others. Outside of the general crypto sphere, Sifted called Aleph Zero as “one of the hottest investments in Europe”, NASDAQ featured our thoughts on regulating DeFi, PharmaPhorum and Economic Times described potential healthcare use cases, Yahoo! News published a piece on privacy by design, and Crowdfund Insider disclosed Aleph Zero’s total fundraise to date. We were also guests in multiple podcasts run by our partners and community. 

It’s absolutely heartwarming to see the support and constructive criticism that you spend time formulating on all of the above. Knowing that we can count on your opinions and thoughts with every released feature or idea makes us more motivated to continue to make Aleph Zero what it set out to be: one of the best privacy-enhancing infrastructure layers ready for the multichain world. 

World-class Team That Will Continue to Impact the Space

In 2021, we’ve managed to build a truly incredible team of scientists, developers, designers, engineers, community managers, and operational specialists. Moreover, we’ve established a People and Culture department responsible for the well-being and retention of our core team members. Huge thanks to each and every one of you for your determination, hard work, and showing up regardless of circumstances.

We’re also excited to say that our advisory team now consists of skilled and experienced individuals with a proven track record, such as: 

• Joeri van Geelen, former managing partner APAC at Prysm Group,
• Max Torres, Head of Finance at 0x,
• Michael Guzik, CEO of CLST, former partner at Blockchain Valley Ventures, and ex-head blockchain and manager digital Strategy at PwC, 
• Alex Strzesniewski, founder and CEO at AngelBlock, an emerging Web3 incubator,
• Michał Brański, a co-owner and CSO at Wirtualna Polska Holding, one of the largest media conglomerates in Poland.

Way More is Yet to Come

In addition to being a part of the Parity’s Substrate Builders Program, joining the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum, and receiving a no-action letter from FINMA, we’re receiving an amazing amount of support from multiple investors including Jun Capital, P-Ops, Blockunify, Genblock Capital, Necker Ventures, Diamond Atlas Capital, Block54, AW3 Labs, Turing Research, Titans Ventures, WW VC, Space Capital, Fatcat Capital, Black Dragon, Ubik Capital, Petrock Capital, Megala Ventures, Skynet Trading, Exnetwork Capital, Dutch Crypto Investors, Supernova, Blockpact, Node Kapital, and more. 

While all of the above is just the beginning, and Aleph Zero is still an early-stage project, it makes us incredibly excited for 2022. Soon enough, we’ll be releasing smart contracts on the testnet as well as details regarding admitting external validators and launching the staking program. We also plan to list on centralized exchanges as well as the decentralized ones as soon as the bridges to popular networks are deployed. Next year will also see—among other unexpected news—further work on the MVP of our privacy stack and more details on Common, which will be the first DEX built on top of Aleph Zero. 

That being said, we will continue to lead with the narrative of being a part of the multichain world. We look forward to becoming a project that connects people rather than divides them. 

Thank you all for supporting us on this journey.