Magdi Kushiev

Aleo achieves this by leveraging decentralized systems and zero-knowledge cryptography to protect user data on the web. At its core, Aleo offers users and application developers unbounded compute with absolute privacy.

By architecting Aleo as a blockchain that is private-by-default, open-source, and built for the web, we believe Aleo is uniquely positioned to address the shortcomings of blockchain adoption. With Aleo, users have access to a world of truly personalized web services without giving up control of their private data.

We believe Aleo will reshape the role decentralized systems play in our society and introduce new experiences never before seen on the web.

For most, blockchains are just a concept. They are “used” by a small proportion of technologists, activists, and speculators. While most blockchains are permissionless, it does not mean they are accessible to all, as the concepts and terminology introduce real barriers. Many call this an onboarding problem. It’s a lot more fundamental than that.

For example, the notion of building smart contract mixers and dark pools on Ethereum remains flawed. Without privacy, these applications cannot fully protect user activity. It simply does not work. For companies, the benefits of running business logic and data on a globally consistent platform are compelling. Yet the lack of privacy is a fundamental barrier to complying with operational guidelines. To achieve real-world adoption, we need blockchains that are private by default.

To us, a technology is worth its development when it solves a real world problem. Instead, many blockchains are built as solutions in search of problems. We believe you have to start from the user experience and work backwards to the technology. The best technologies are easy - even joyful - to use, and make the world better.

We see it in many ecosystems, including ours. For example, the recent advent of closed-source scalability engines has been a second wave to the initial era of “permissioned blockchains”. It goes without saying that vendor lock-in is rarely a good thing, especially as it pertains to “trustless” solutions. But by building a technology controlled entirely by one company and available only from one company, it is, by definition, a “trusted” solution. To show the value proposition for a new technology, the solution should be open-source and permissionless.

In the next decade, web services will evolve to become truly personal, living in more places than just your browser, and reason over every intimate detail of our personal lives. There are examples to demonstrate this already. For example, in the past five years, the number of in-home smart assistants has grown from zero to half a billion web-connected devices. Our private lives have become a public commodity and as web services evolve to become more personal, we need to rethink how we control our data.

If it lives online, somebody else owns it. The business model of the web is to provide free services in exchange for personal data. This model is antiquated and puts users at odds with providers. The user is forced to give up their data in exchange for services they want, at the cost of personal privacy. The provider bears the risks for managing user data to provide their service, facing the implications of storing, processing, and reporting it. It does not have to be this way and it should not be this way.

Instead, users should be able to run their data on transparent algorithms from the provider. And providers should not need to store, process, or report user data. Instead, they should be able to offload their work to the user and merely verify a response. By providing services this way, neither the user nor the provider learns more than they should, and the control over personal data remains with the user.

As the existing web is a subset of this model, users are able to use the concepts they already know from the web to interact on Aleo. And by introducing private applications as a new layer to the web, providers are able to offer new experiences to users without replacing their stack.

Unlike existing solutions that seek to replace it, Aleo is designed to integrate with it. For users, Aleo introduces new experiences that are both truly personal and truly private. And for developers, Aleo introduces a programming model that integrates with existing web applications.

To write private applications on Aleo intuitively and easily, we are developing a programming language called Leo. Leo looks and feels just like a traditional programming language. Yet under the hood, Leo is far more complex. Leo abstracts low-level cryptographic concepts and makes it easy to integrate private applications into your stack.

To jumpstart the development cycle, we are building Aleo Studio, the first IDE for writing zero-knowledge applications.

Aleo Studio, the first IDE for writing zero-knowledge applications

Aleo achieves this by leveraging decentralized systems and zero-knowledge cryptography to protect user data on the web. At its core, Aleo offers users and application developers unbounded compute with absolute privacy.

By architecting Aleo as a blockchain that is private-by-default, open-source, and built for the web, we believe Aleo is uniquely positioned to address the shortcomings of blockchain adoption. With Aleo, users have access to a world of truly personalized web services without giving up control of their private data.

We believe Aleo will reshape the role decentralized systems play in our society and introduce new experiences never before seen on the web.

For most, blockchains are just a concept. They are “used” by a small proportion of technologists, activists, and speculators. While most blockchains are permissionless, it does not mean they are accessible to all, as the concepts and terminology introduce real barriers. Many call this an onboarding problem. It’s a lot more fundamental than that.

For example, the notion of building smart contract mixers and dark pools on Ethereum remains flawed. Without privacy, these applications cannot fully protect user activity. It simply does not work. For companies, the benefits of running business logic and data on a globally consistent platform are compelling. Yet the lack of privacy is a fundamental barrier to complying with operational guidelines. To achieve real-world adoption, we need blockchains that are private by default.

To us, a technology is worth its development when it solves a real world problem. Instead, many blockchains are built as solutions in search of problems. We believe you have to start from the user experience and work backwards to the technology. The best technologies are easy - even joyful - to use, and make the world better.

We see it in many ecosystems, including ours. For example, the recent advent of closed-source scalability engines has been a second wave to the initial era of “permissioned blockchains”. It goes without saying that vendor lock-in is rarely a good thing, especially as it pertains to “trustless” solutions. But by building a technology controlled entirely by one company and available only from one company, it is, by definition, a “trusted” solution. To show the value proposition for a new technology, the solution should be open-source and permissionless.

In the next decade, web services will evolve to become truly personal, living in more places than just your browser, and reason over every intimate detail of our personal lives. There are examples to demonstrate this already. For example, in the past five years, the number of in-home smart assistants has grown from zero to half a billion web-connected devices. Our private lives have become a public commodity and as web services evolve to become more personal, we need to rethink how we control our data.

If it lives online, somebody else owns it. The business model of the web is to provide free services in exchange for personal data. This model is antiquated and puts users at odds with providers. The user is forced to give up their data in exchange for services they want, at the cost of personal privacy. The provider bears the risks for managing user data to provide their service, facing the implications of storing, processing, and reporting it. It does not have to be this way and it should not be this way.

Instead, users should be able to run their data on transparent algorithms from the provider. And providers should not need to store, process, or report user data. Instead, they should be able to offload their work to the user and merely verify a response. By providing services this way, neither the user nor the provider learns more than they should, and the control over personal data remains with the user.

As the existing web is a subset of this model, users are able to use the concepts they already know from the web to interact on Aleo. And by introducing private applications as a new layer to the web, providers are able to offer new experiences to users without replacing their stack.

Unlike existing solutions that seek to replace it, Aleo is designed to integrate with it. For users, Aleo introduces new experiences that are both truly personal and truly private. And for developers, Aleo introduces a programming model that integrates with existing web applications.

To write private applications on Aleo intuitively and easily, we are developing a programming language called Leo. Leo looks and feels just like a traditional programming language. Yet under the hood, Leo is far more complex. Leo abstracts low-level cryptographic concepts and makes it easy to integrate private applications into your stack.

To jumpstart the development cycle, we are building Aleo Studio, the first IDE for writing zero-knowledge applications.

Aleo Studio, the first IDE for writing zero-knowledge applications

GLITCH is a blockchain-agnostic super protocol explicitly designed for trustless money markets and decentralized financial applications (dApps). Glitch solves the expensive fee structure of other blockchain platforms while simultaneously rewarding all ecosystem participants and guaranteeing low network fees. Glitch plans to incorporate token wrapping bridges, where dApps can run more efficiently, all in service of Glitch’s ultimate goal: to become a cornerstone of blockchain infrastructure.

GLITCH is a blockchain-agnostic super protocol explicitly designed for trustless money markets and decentralized financial applications (dApps). Glitch solves the expensive fee structure of other blockchain platforms while simultaneously rewarding all ecosystem participants and guaranteeing low network fees. Glitch plans to incorporate token wrapping bridges, where dApps can run more efficiently, all in service of Glitch’s ultimate goal: to become a cornerstone of blockchain infrastructure.

CowSwap offers the decentralized finance community a teaser of the capabilities of Gnosis Protocol v2. CowSwap is a fully permissionless DEX that protects them from MEV (Miner/Maximum Extractable Value) via batch auctions, offers off-chain gasless order placement & has access to all on-chain liquidity.

On CowSwap, orders are placed off-chain and are not immediately executed, but rather collected and aggregated to be settled in batches, which is the price finding mechanism the protocol uses to settle trades. It uses batch auctions with uniform clearing prices for all trades in the same batch, therefore there is no need for ordering the transactions within a single batch. Because everyone receives the same price across assets it’s not possible for any value to be extracted by placing transactions in a certain order. This prevents the primary strategy used in MEV. Batches are settled on-chain by an external, independent party (called “solvers”). Solvers are a person or entity who submits order settlement solutions that maximize trade surplus for a given batch.

CowSwap leverages Coincidence of Wants (CoW): “An economic phenomenon where two parties each hold an item the other wants, so they exchange these items directly.” If CoWs (Coincidence of Wants) orders exist in a batch, the “smaller” order is matched fully with the larger order. The excess of the larger order is settled with the best available base liquidity. The clearing price for both orders will be the price of the token with the excess amount on external liquidity sources to which the protocol is connected.

CowSwap can connect to all on-chain liquidity, when it does not have enough CoWs among the orders available for a batch, it taps other AMMs’ liquidity to be able to settle the traders’ orders. We really hope you like CowSwap. If you do, Milk it!

Much like the Komodo blockchain covered in a previous DeFi Deep Dive, the CowSwap (Gnosis Protocol) team is focused on a DeFi future that connects different blockchains and digital assets.

CowSwap is a fully permissionless decentralized trading mechanism (protocol) running on Ethereum & xDAI.

Gnosis Protocol V1, CowSwap’s predecessor, launched in 2020. It was the first DEX to offer ring trades via batch auctions. These are order settlements that share liquidity across all orders.

This was followed up by V2, which launched in April 2021. This version leverages economic phenomena that can only happen within batch auctions which are called, Coincidence of Wants (CoWs). Batch Auctions allow CowSwap to provide miner extractable value (MEV) protection as well as offer better prices by tapping into all the on-chain liquidity sources and settling trades in batches.

Cowswap.exchange is the first trading interface built on top of the Gnosis protocol v2. It was launched as the proof-of-concept for V2, but after 3 months, the final stable version was deployed.

After going live in April, the novel DEX reached $1 billion trading volume within the first five months.

If you have been following DeFi space, you must be aware that the efficacy of a DEX depends on its popularity and the liquidity that it is able to attract. After all, the underlying DEX principle is that liquidity providers stake, or lock in, their assets into all sorts of liquidity pools.

Then, those who wish to exchange tokens would tap into the liquidity pools that price assets based on the number of tokens in the pool, whilst giving liquidity providers a cut in the process.

However, CowSwap takes this a step further. It offers better prices by, if possible, matching overlapping users’ orders directly in a batch auction, instead of making them wade through liquidity pools, or it directly connects them to the best on-chain price at the moment of trading via either DEX Aggregators or direct DEXs interactions.

CowSwap deals with liquidity issues by running batch auctions as the key trading mechanism across all orders. This allows the protocol to offer its MEV protection as well as uniform clearing prices for all the trades of the same token pairs within each batch.

Batch auctions as a trading mechanism allow users’ trades to either be matched directly when there are opposite wants or to be bundled together and routed to the best on-chain liquidity venue at the moment of trading.

While Uniswap and other DEXes use AMM (automated market maker) or CLOB (Central Limit Order Book), CowSwap uses a decentralized batch auction competition, where solvers compete to settle trades within each batch.

Essentially, the solvers act as meta aggregators for the users, connecting them directly with overlapping users or with DEX aggregators and DEXes.

Solvers are professional third parties that compete amongst each other to get the most optimal batch settlement solution.

Within these batch auctions, they are able to search for CoWs (Coincidence of wants) within the trades, as well as being able to tap into the best available on-chain liquidity for all trades in the batch that can’t be settled into a CoW.

If the user’s trade happens to be in a CoW, then their trade is fully MEV protected as the liquidity is completely off-chain, while if the user’s trade doesn’t happen to be in a CoW, then the trade is MEV protected because the solvers make sure to set such tight slippage for all trades in a batch so that those trades are executed at those prices.

MEV is a serious problem, at the moment, since Jan 1, 2020, a total of $737.1 million has already been extracted from Ethereum DeFi users.

Cowswap allows traders to get MEV protection and better prices and don’t have to deal with liquidity provider fees as they are matched directly, on top of obtaining gas savings from not having to invoke a smart contract call to get the liquidity out of the pools or by the fact that solvers can bundle multiple transactions into one.

CowSwap’s batch auction model that can match orders peer-to-peer has made MEV less of an issue. Speaking of upgrades and Ethereum, the CowSwap team responded to BIC that ETH 2.0 should not have a negative effect on CowSwap’s value proposition, quite the contrary.

“The value proposition of CowSwap, minimizing MEV for users’ trades, still holds true in ETH 2.0. Additionally, we expect that because of the scalability brought by the upgrade, more value will be transacted in Ethereum: there will be more opportunities for bad actors to extract value from the users, and hence the need for a protocol that minimizes MEV for the users,” explain the team.

In April, Balancer (BAL) and CowSwap partnered to launch Balancer-Gnosis (CoW)-Protocol (BGP). Balancer regularly visits top 10 DEXes utilizing automated market maker (AMM). At press time, its market cap is $191.2 million, with BAL token at $27.53.

The partnership had been set to unroll the new BGP platform in three stages. Thus, ending with the integration of Balancer V2 with Gnosis Protocol V2 in the BGP dApp.

Therefore this partnership will provide mutual benefits. Balancer receives better MEV protection, while CowSwap gets a tighter integration with Balancer v2 liquidity pools.

Ethereum will remain the home for CowSwap in the foreseeable future, with some major updates on the way. Although, “We are also researching how we can use L1 liquidity to settle trades happening on L2, which will definitely be a game-changer,” says the team.

In the meantime, CowSwap discounts on gas fees during the integration. Therefore, incentivizing users across the Ethereum ecosystem to find refuge from its exorbitantly high fees.

Although CowSwap’s market footprint is a long way from the likes of Uniswap, joining forces with Balancer may just be what it takes to gain ground in the ever-growing DeFi ecosystem.

CowSwap offers the decentralized finance community a teaser of the capabilities of Gnosis Protocol v2. CowSwap is a fully permissionless DEX that protects them from MEV (Miner/Maximum Extractable Value) via batch auctions, offers off-chain gasless order placement & has access to all on-chain liquidity.

On CowSwap, orders are placed off-chain and are not immediately executed, but rather collected and aggregated to be settled in batches, which is the price finding mechanism the protocol uses to settle trades. It uses batch auctions with uniform clearing prices for all trades in the same batch, therefore there is no need for ordering the transactions within a single batch. Because everyone receives the same price across assets it’s not possible for any value to be extracted by placing transactions in a certain order. This prevents the primary strategy used in MEV. Batches are settled on-chain by an external, independent party (called “solvers”). Solvers are a person or entity who submits order settlement solutions that maximize trade surplus for a given batch.

CowSwap leverages Coincidence of Wants (CoW): “An economic phenomenon where two parties each hold an item the other wants, so they exchange these items directly.” If CoWs (Coincidence of Wants) orders exist in a batch, the “smaller” order is matched fully with the larger order. The excess of the larger order is settled with the best available base liquidity. The clearing price for both orders will be the price of the token with the excess amount on external liquidity sources to which the protocol is connected.

CowSwap can connect to all on-chain liquidity, when it does not have enough CoWs among the orders available for a batch, it taps other AMMs’ liquidity to be able to settle the traders’ orders. We really hope you like CowSwap. If you do, Milk it!

Much like the Komodo blockchain covered in a previous DeFi Deep Dive, the CowSwap (Gnosis Protocol) team is focused on a DeFi future that connects different blockchains and digital assets.

CowSwap is a fully permissionless decentralized trading mechanism (protocol) running on Ethereum & xDAI.

Gnosis Protocol V1, CowSwap’s predecessor, launched in 2020. It was the first DEX to offer ring trades via batch auctions. These are order settlements that share liquidity across all orders.

This was followed up by V2, which launched in April 2021. This version leverages economic phenomena that can only happen within batch auctions which are called, Coincidence of Wants (CoWs). Batch Auctions allow CowSwap to provide miner extractable value (MEV) protection as well as offer better prices by tapping into all the on-chain liquidity sources and settling trades in batches.

Cowswap.exchange is the first trading interface built on top of the Gnosis protocol v2. It was launched as the proof-of-concept for V2, but after 3 months, the final stable version was deployed.

After going live in April, the novel DEX reached $1 billion trading volume within the first five months.

If you have been following DeFi space, you must be aware that the efficacy of a DEX depends on its popularity and the liquidity that it is able to attract. After all, the underlying DEX principle is that liquidity providers stake, or lock in, their assets into all sorts of liquidity pools.

Then, those who wish to exchange tokens would tap into the liquidity pools that price assets based on the number of tokens in the pool, whilst giving liquidity providers a cut in the process.

However, CowSwap takes this a step further. It offers better prices by, if possible, matching overlapping users’ orders directly in a batch auction, instead of making them wade through liquidity pools, or it directly connects them to the best on-chain price at the moment of trading via either DEX Aggregators or direct DEXs interactions.

CowSwap deals with liquidity issues by running batch auctions as the key trading mechanism across all orders. This allows the protocol to offer its MEV protection as well as uniform clearing prices for all the trades of the same token pairs within each batch.

Batch auctions as a trading mechanism allow users’ trades to either be matched directly when there are opposite wants or to be bundled together and routed to the best on-chain liquidity venue at the moment of trading.

While Uniswap and other DEXes use AMM (automated market maker) or CLOB (Central Limit Order Book), CowSwap uses a decentralized batch auction competition, where solvers compete to settle trades within each batch.

Essentially, the solvers act as meta aggregators for the users, connecting them directly with overlapping users or with DEX aggregators and DEXes.

Solvers are professional third parties that compete amongst each other to get the most optimal batch settlement solution.

Within these batch auctions, they are able to search for CoWs (Coincidence of wants) within the trades, as well as being able to tap into the best available on-chain liquidity for all trades in the batch that can’t be settled into a CoW.

If the user’s trade happens to be in a CoW, then their trade is fully MEV protected as the liquidity is completely off-chain, while if the user’s trade doesn’t happen to be in a CoW, then the trade is MEV protected because the solvers make sure to set such tight slippage for all trades in a batch so that those trades are executed at those prices.

MEV is a serious problem, at the moment, since Jan 1, 2020, a total of $737.1 million has already been extracted from Ethereum DeFi users.

Cowswap allows traders to get MEV protection and better prices and don’t have to deal with liquidity provider fees as they are matched directly, on top of obtaining gas savings from not having to invoke a smart contract call to get the liquidity out of the pools or by the fact that solvers can bundle multiple transactions into one.

CowSwap’s batch auction model that can match orders peer-to-peer has made MEV less of an issue. Speaking of upgrades and Ethereum, the CowSwap team responded to BIC that ETH 2.0 should not have a negative effect on CowSwap’s value proposition, quite the contrary.

“The value proposition of CowSwap, minimizing MEV for users’ trades, still holds true in ETH 2.0. Additionally, we expect that because of the scalability brought by the upgrade, more value will be transacted in Ethereum: there will be more opportunities for bad actors to extract value from the users, and hence the need for a protocol that minimizes MEV for the users,” explain the team.

In April, Balancer (BAL) and CowSwap partnered to launch Balancer-Gnosis (CoW)-Protocol (BGP). Balancer regularly visits top 10 DEXes utilizing automated market maker (AMM). At press time, its market cap is $191.2 million, with BAL token at $27.53.

The partnership had been set to unroll the new BGP platform in three stages. Thus, ending with the integration of Balancer V2 with Gnosis Protocol V2 in the BGP dApp.

Therefore this partnership will provide mutual benefits. Balancer receives better MEV protection, while CowSwap gets a tighter integration with Balancer v2 liquidity pools.

Ethereum will remain the home for CowSwap in the foreseeable future, with some major updates on the way. Although, “We are also researching how we can use L1 liquidity to settle trades happening on L2, which will definitely be a game-changer,” says the team.

In the meantime, CowSwap discounts on gas fees during the integration. Therefore, incentivizing users across the Ethereum ecosystem to find refuge from its exorbitantly high fees.

Although CowSwap’s market footprint is a long way from the likes of Uniswap, joining forces with Balancer may just be what it takes to gain ground in the ever-growing DeFi ecosystem.

This roadmap covers from the very beginning of the launch to our vision for the future of Mekaformers. Since our assets were made using Unreal Engine 5 we are ahead in terms of development, granting us a competitive advantage within the market.

1 Launch

Utility comes first. Mekaformers were made in Unreal Engine 5, we have all assets rigged, game and metaverse-ready so from the very beginning you will be owning an asset that already has further utility within both metaverse and gaming areas that come along with full commercial rights.The drop will be announced as we grow together, we want a community as solid as the materials our Mekaformers are made out of!

2 Unreal Engine 5 ( Ready )

Mekaformers are ready to be used in Unreal Engine 5, 1 week after the launch we will be uploading the files to the website for every holder that wants either to build a game or explore the capabilities their Mekaformers allow in Unreal Engine 5, every contribution to our universe is always welcome. Mekaformers are ready to be used as the community pleases!

3 Blender rigged bodies ( Ready )

Of course we know there are a lot of incredible people with amazing skills within NFT space, so 2 weeks after launch we will be uploading blender files to our website the owners of Mekaformers can claim for free!

4 Mekaformers: LEGACY

Mekaformers LEGACY are the second drop from Mekaformers, they will grant you access to the upcoming play-to-earn as well as benefits such as staking to gain $FUEL, Mekaformer’s token. Legacy also makes you eligible to participate in $FUEL airdrop.

5 Staking ($FUEL)

We are developing our STAKING feature.You will be able to stake your GENESIS and LEGACY NFTs, and therefore earn $FUEL, Mekaformer´s token. You will be able to spend $FUEL in "The Armory" and craft different equipment (guns, shields, and all kind of weapons ) to improve the stats of your in-game characters from Mekaformers World. This equipment will be crucial in the future P2E game.

6 Metaverse Avatars & Wearables

As we have everything prepared, metaverse avatars are a natural step for the Mekaformers universe, it will take us up to 4 weeks to introduce Mekaformers in the first of the many metaverses we want to introduce them in!

7 Play-to-earn

All Mekaformers are ready-to-go and fully working in Unreal Engine 5, our next step is to build a play-to-earn game with them!.We are so excited to talk with you about it. We will also be exploring other genres apart from main game that could fit into our world to bring Mekaformers further and keep developing titles connected with the same technology!

8 Big Screen

Our team features the artists in charge of the most successful movies the world has seen within the past 18 years. Not only our skills make us the perfect fit to be capable of producing a movie or a series but we’ve been gathering a strong network within the Hollywood industry throughout our lives! It would be amazing to lead Mekaformers into the Big Screen!

Aztec is a scalable Ethereum Layer 2 privacy solution that secures user and business data in Web3.

Secret Network is the first blockchain with data privacy by default, allowing you to create and use applications that do not require permission and preserve privacy. This unique feature protects users, secures applications, and opens up hundreds of new uses for Web3.

Stader is a protocol that creates native smart contracts on multiple chains including Terra, Solana, Ethereum, Fantom, Hedera, Polygon and creates an economic ecosystem to grow and develop solutions such as rewarded yield redirection, liquid staking, launch pads, games and more.

Aleph Zero is a high privacy blockchain. The basis is a consensus protocol developed on the basis of Substrate, the project solves the problems of speed, validation time, scalability and security.

MechaFight is a P2E game with PvP mode and smart robots that you can develop and breed to take part in new battles.