Aleph Zero Review And Rating (E)

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One of my duties as a public reviewer is to objectively express my opinion about DLT protocols regardless how long / closely I know people associated with it.
Nonetheless, I still find it very difficult to abstract myself from those externalities and to not let its influence my ratings. That becomes particularly tricky in case of my early supporters, which by their contributions (sometimes monetary) had helped svetrating.com to grow.
On many occasions I even had to restrain myself from publishing my reviews of this sort. However, sometimes I have to act otherwise even at the risk of being accused in ‘softness’ and ‘non- objectivity’ because I simply liked the direction in which a particular protocol is pulling itself since its inception and think that it would be unfair to not reflect this apparent progress in my ratings.
EXECUTION:
For starter, I intend to review Aleph Zero ‘Business Whitepaper’ and assign ‘Execution’ (Solution — Validity — Equity — Team) sub-rating to it. This paper introduces ‘A novel consensus protocol that solves the shortcomings of current distributed ledger technology solutions’.
I met one of the cofounders — Matthew Niemerg (@matthewniemerg) — about a year ago during one of those overcrowded blockchain conferences in San Francisco analogues of which we won’t be, probably, seeing many in the observable future due to the increasingly crazy state of the world.
Short after that I’d had an opportunity to read Aleph’s consensus protocol paper and become both impressed by its content and engraved by its form (more on this in the System part of the review).
At that time it was difficult to imagine how it might be possible for the team to sort themselves out from so many promising business opportunities which their protocol might lead them. Apparently, from what I’m now seeing in this 30-pages piece, the Aleph Zero team didn’t dare to take the middle road and chose them all, instead :)
Extract: “Aleph Zero is an ecosystem that consists of:
- Aleph Consensus (A novel DAG protocol);
- Aleph Cloud (Decentralized file storage / IPFS);
- Aleph Smart Contracts (Scalable, self-executing smart contracts);
- Aleph Common (Decentralized Exchange (DEX) with a trustless universal wallet);
- Aleph Oracle (Information bridge between the external world and the Aleph Zero ecosystem)”
Some might argue that our space doesn’t need yet another DAG (btw, none of which so far were able to impress the market enough to get raised in top 20) and all we wish for now is ‘the second layer adaption solutions’.
I kinda agree with that, except that we are still early infants in our market’s lives and restricting ourselves to several already well known protocols, under the pretext that ‘we, first, have to see how it goes before investing in others’ seems a bit too premature.
Besides, one of those business cases, which I found in this paper (IoT, smart contracts, supply chain management, virtual game assets, decentralized DNS and universal wallet / DEX) might, indeed, need some ‘fresh blood’ injected into it.
We, of course, are all well aware of how much we depend on ETH in our strive for decentralization. Although, so many (but, primary, EOS, Cardano and Tezos) aim to dispute king’s crown, Vitalik is still ‘our only hope’, which is not necessarily a good thing, specially, given the sporadically skyrocketing gas fees and ever increasing pressure from ‘everything security’ apparatus.
Faced by that we might have had not only plan B,C, D and E but also F as well . Would Aleph be able to stand up for this monumental task isn’t completely clear at this early moment of its life — but I intend to give them some leeway and assign ‘b’ instead of ‘b-’ for the ‘Solution’, which at this stage doesn’t look strikingly revolutionary.
On the other side, it would be grossly myopic to not see the good promises of the Aleph’s team, which Matthew brought together to surmount all of those seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Delight to my eyes, it includes almost exclusively people with solid mathematical background as well as proven coding skills. Not at all those ‘generalists’ and ‘managerial’ non-senses :)
However, there’s some price to be paid, when you’re too heavy on PhDs. As a result, this team is, apparently, a bit short on their proven business records side. Result: “Team” is ‘a-’.
Also, I have had some difficulties in obtaining information from open sources about their financial (‘Equity’) and (‘Legal’) statuses.
Certainly, it’s absolutely not unheard-of situation in our growingly acidic environment, where nefarious agents of different ranks and files are more than eager to take the slightest opportunity to misuse this type of information.
Notwithstanding, I always prefer and admire the ‘low-shield’ approach in that domain. Specially, when actors start seeking a road to our public crypto-funds (which is not, as far as I know, the case with Aleph, yet). Still, my calling, until I’ve, myself, seen those records, is to assign ‘c’ to both of those sub-ratings.
Overall, however, I’m very impressed with the progress this bright and inspired people have made so far on their difficult journey.
Result for ‘Execution’ (Solution — Validity — Equity — Team): b/c/c/a-
Link: https://alephzero.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/AlephZero_BWP_20190809.pdf
Link (the full version of the review): http://svetrating.com/texts/71/
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