Countries worldwide spend trillions of dollars combined in research and development (R&D) to get an edge over others. Whether it’s the space race, manufacturing, or defense, security, and intelligence, countries with low R&D are guaranteed to be left behind.
Likewise, businesses (small, medium, or large) that fail to adopt new technology and invest in R&D to optimize their systems, processes, and people will lose significance and disappear altogether.
At a fundamental level, research starts by asking curious questions, which aims to push the frontiers of human knowledge. Academics at universities, research institutes, or independent research organizations usually carry out this type of fundamental research. The application and utility of fundamental research aren’t always obvious to outsiders, and its impact is rarely felt outside the academic bubble.
However, in the research, innovation, and development pipeline, there is another phase of research that aims to ask how the knowledge generated by fundamental research can be applied to resolve real-world problems. The findings from applied research can be used to commercialize ideas.
Businesses and institutions then use these findings to innovate new or improved products and services. Innovation happens when research is applied outside the academia to benefit any part of society. This is where academics work with businesses to turn their projects into goods or services to generate revenue and ultimately boost the economy.
This commercialization of knowledge and ideas is vital for the sustainability of any sector, especially research endeavors that usually rely on grant funding or philanthropy.
This post summarizes the evolution of Aleph Zero — a rapidly emerging privacy-enhancing public layer-1 blockchain — from their humble origins in R&D to a leading service and infrastructure provider in Web3. We will also provide a forward look at Aleph Zero, focusing on its use of R&D to innovate and improve its products and services.
Research at Cardinal Cryptography
Aleph Zero was founded by Cardinal Cryptography, which is an R&D company specializing in Web3. Aleph Zero’s co-founders and early team members (from Cardinal Cryptography) have strong academic and research backgrounds ranging from PhDs in mathematics, computer science, and cryptography. Naturally, the team took an academic approach by spending years of scientific research that led to the development of Aleph Zero.
As such, we can trace Aleph Zero’s origin to pure research where the Cardinal spent years developing the Aleph Zero protocol. The team understood the real-world potential of blockchains (see the summary of applications here). However, they quickly realized that existing Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) were implemented with shortcomings and inefficiencies that acted as a barrier to bringing their and others’ ideas to fruition.
Commonly referred to as the “blockchain trilemma” (issues related to security, scalability, and decentralization), challenges are generally associated with privacy, security, scalability, speed, and cost. The Cardinal team realized that the industry must overcome these challenges before making truly groundbreaking products. That is when they started years of rigorous research to look for innovative and novel solutions to help the industry overcome these challenges.
The team sought to create a thorough solution to the problem of how to transmit data and value across networks with high throughput and quick confirmation in a decentralized manner. The result was an ideation of a novel consensus protocol that uses a DAG architecture as an intermediary data structure. Aleph Zero aimed to solve the industry-wide challenges by combining their consensus protocol with the Substrate stack and introducing an original, software-based privacy layer (Liminal) on top of the network. Cardinal Cryptography’s research, which resulted in the Aleph Zero consensus protocol was published as a novel scientific paper.
The protocol was peer-reviewed before being accepted for publication in the conference proceedings of Advances in Financial Technology* in 2019. This paper serves as the original Aleph Zero whitepaper. Business whitepaper is also available for non-academic audiences. Peer review publications may seem trivial, but it’s far from it. To understand why, we must know a bit about peer review.
(*Peer-reviewed academic publications are usually locked behind a paywall by publishers, which is also the case for Aleph Zero’s publication. You can read the open-access version of the whitepaper here.)
Peer review
When scientific teams conduct research, they write up their finding in the form of a scientific paper, which they submit to academic publishers to be printed in their prestigious journals. However, publishing invalid and poor-quality articles is against the scientific and public interest. Therefore, publishers use peer review to assess the validity, quality, and often the originality of scientific papers. Peer review acts as quality control for academic journals and helps maintain the integrity of science. To carry out the peer review, journals anonymously send the paper — submitted for publication by the scientific team — to experts in the field and request them to assess the paper against quality, rigor, and validity.
3–5 field experts usually review the paper before a decision is made by a journal to either reject or accept the scientific article for publication. Papers may also be suggested for additional improvements, data, or further experimentations before being considered for publication. This is an extremely rigorous process and is the gold standard in scientific assessment where research is validated by peers and experts in their field. In other words, only the cream of the crop is likely to make it past peer review.
Aleph Zero’s whitepaper was independently assessed and verified by experts in mathematics and cryptography. The team also invites anyone interested to review their research, provide constructive feedback, and participate in discussions.
The Aleph Zero Foundation and Cardinal Cryptography team have also done some heavy research in collaboration with Nethermind Research to develop the whitepaper for Common, an order book with privacy. Nethermind is a powerhouse in blockchain R&D having delivered pioneering research and development for leading web3 projects, including Ethereum, Starkware, Aave, EigenLayer, Lido, and dYdX amongst others.
The Common whitepaper is also undergoing peer review with assessment outcomes expected soon. The implementation of the Common whitepaper as the product is expected to be released in Aleph Zero’s testnet soon with mainnet launch in the first half of 2024. Learn more about Common here.
Other R&D services and recognition
The Cardinal team members - Dr. Adam Gągol (Ph.D), and Dr. Damian Straszak, (Ph.D) - also collaborated with Casper Labs to develop the whitepaper for the Casper blockchain consensus protocol. The Casper network’s protocol is called “Highway”, and it has several benefits over classic Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Highway protocol allows networks to reach higher thresholds of finality, meaning that more blocks are finalized, and validators agree to add them to the blockchain.
It’s a testament to the R&D credentials of the Cardinal Cryptography team that they were approached to collaborate on the development of the consensus protocol for one of the leading enterprise-focused Layer 1 blockchains.
In addition to receiving the recognition and validation of web3 and the academic community, Aleph Zero and Cardinal Cryptography have also won several prestigious competitions and awards for their product. Below is a summary of prizes and recognition that the team has received from a range of organizations and institutions.
Kraków Technology Park (KPT), 2021: winner of the startup of the year. The KPT is the most complete one-stop shop for businesses operating in Poland. Aleph Zero competed against startups from all sectors in Poland to secure this award.
European FinTech Hackcelerator, 2022: Joint winners of the European hackcelerator contest, which presented the team with a chance to represent Europe in the Global FinTech Hackcelerator. The European FinTech Hackcelerator is an international, tailor-made program for startups ready to expand to the Southeast Asian market and looking for global partners and clients.
Global FinTech Hackcelerator, 2022: The team was one of the finalists in the Global hackcelerator event. This event is sponsored by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and seeks to unlock the potential of Financial Technology in accelerating the development of Web3 and Green Finance solutions.
Next Block Expo, 2023: winner of the best infrastructure project, where Aleph Zero competed against Mantle, BNB Chain, and Polygon to secure this award. Next Block Expo is also known as the blockchain festival of Europe attracting a range of web3 founders, investors, and communities.
European Blockchain Convention, 2023: Top 3 in Europe’s top blockchain startup of the year. The European Blockchain Convention aims to accelerate the blockchain ecosystem in Europe and it attracts a global audience of founders, investors, regulators, developers, corporations, and many more.
Deloitte Central Europe, Technology Award 2023: 2nd place in the “companies to watch” category. Aleph Zero and Cardinal Cryptography came above several businesses in Central Europe to rank second amongst companies that show great potential but are too young to meet the criterion for the main Fast 50 category.
Summary
Aleph Zero and its core developer Cardinal Cryptography started with research and building on their research, they have managed to develop an innovative product that helps resolve classical barriers that DLT technology faced. Their thorough approach to R&D has received recognition and validation from academic peers, web3 researchers and projects, and industrial partners.
The team's journey along the research, innovation, and development pipeline has been rapid and is continuing a steep trajectory with the imminent launch of several high-quality and anticipated products, including Common. With such a strong research base and a high-performing team, we may see the team make more discoveries leading to future innovations in web3 and beyond.
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