Q4 Update

Dear Aleph Zero Community,

An update is long overdue.

Apologies for the silence, but we were not at liberty to make public certain activities that have been happening since May 2025.

More on this topic towards the end of the update.

Handover

We are happy to report all components necessary for the Aleph Zero mainnet to stay alive have been provided—primary websites, aleph-node repository and auxiliary repositories, and so on. There were some very minor requests outstanding (updated documentation, clarification on transfer of a domain, and a few other tasks that are non-essential to maintaining the L1).

Migration of websites away from Digital Ocean to unmanaged dedicated servers is complete. Furthermore, the AWS infrastructure has been dismantled for some time. Other non-critical infrastructure has also deactivated for awhile. At the moment, nearly all cost-saving techniques have been implemented for the mainnet to stay live.

Developer Updates

Several firms and individuals have been identified as suitable for continuing the next stage of development of the mainnet – which mainly consists of updating the aleph-node repository and making it compatible with the latest version of PolkadotSDK and then thereafter adding support for the pallets-revive pallet in order to support RISC-V. We are waiting to proceed based on various estimates with respect to time and cost. For the initial proposed work, the cost and time estimates received thus far are rather reasonable – roughly a month of work. This time, however, does not include deploying the update on testnet and ensuring network stability on the new code prior to updating mainnet.

DAO Transition Status

While we are still preparing a move towards a DAO, the process is far from complete. We invite active community discussion in our new telegram channel (https://t.me/alephzerodao).

Various ideas are being proposed by community members with respect to funding, setting priorities on the features to develop for the project, how to promote more transparency, and what the structure looks like for those who wish to be involved.

Legal Claim

Finally, we want to make the community aware of certain pending legal issues.

Immediately after the resignation of board member Gagol, the Foundation attempted to negotiate with Cardinal Cryptography. As the community is aware, these negotiations ultimately failed.

Following these discussions, the Foundation filed a claim against Cardinal Cryptography. Due to the international nature of the parties involved in the claim, the legal process for being served with the claim takes time. Only just recently, the Aleph Zero Foundation has been notified that Cardinal Cryptography has been made notified of our claim.

As this topic is sensitive, we trust the community understands our inability to have communicated this information prior to now.

We will not make any further comments on this matter until the claim is fully resolved either by the Swiss Court or if both Parties agree to a settlement.

Final Thoughts

While this may not be the update people have been waiting for, we have accomplished quite a bit in the last months. The items that we chose to focus on were done to put the chain in as much of a hibernation mode and to preserve capital while the final path, in conjunction with the community, is determined on how best to move forward.

Here is a summary:

1. All essential items necessary for maintaining the Aleph Zero mainnet have been handed over;

2. cost cutting techniques have been implemented;

3. several developers and firms have been identified that can support chain updates to be compatible with the latest PolkadotSDK and to support RISC-V and possibly more;

4. discussion is ongoing with the community regarding DAO structure; and

5. legal proceedings have progressed.

We appreciate your understanding and continued support during this transition period as we move forward to a more decentralized future.

Kind regards,

Aleph Zero Foundation