Here's our Manifesto: Crypto began with a simple, radical idea: remove trusted intermediaries from digital transactions. Not just banks or governments - all intermediaries. The cypherpunks of the 1990s envisioned a world where cryptographic proof replaced institutional trust, where privacy was default, and where individuals controlled their own digital fate. Bitcoin was supposed to be digital cash - private, peer-to-peer, outside the control of any institution. The whitepaper promised "electronic transactions without relying on trust." This wasn't about making payments faster or cheaper. It was about fundamentally changing who controls money and information. But somewhere along the way, the industry lost the plot. Bitcoin became "digital gold" and “a transparent ledger where every transaction is public forever.” Your wallet balance, transaction history, and spending patterns are readable by anyone with an internet connection. This certainly isn't privacy. It’s closer to surveillance infrastructure with an extra step. And if someone knows everything about you they control you. Ethereum added programmability but made the privacy problem worse. Every smart contract execution, every DeFi trade, every NFT purchase is broadcast to the world. MEV bots front-run your transactions because they can see them coming. Competitors analyze your DeFi positions because they're public. Worse, both systems force global recomputation of everything. Every node re-executes every transaction to verify the network state. This architectural choice, having thousands of machines redo the same work to maintain consensus, made privacy impossible and scalability an unsolvable problem. The "world computer" became the world's most inefficient computer, where computation gets more expensive as more people use it. The industry didn't just convince itself this was acceptable: it convinced itself this was the point. And worse, that it has been the point all along. "Transparency is a feature, not a bug" became the rallying cry. "Auditable transactions" and "public verification" were reframed as innovations rather than failures. We were told that being able to track every transaction was somehow aligned with decentralization, that surveillance = accountability. Ethereum doubled down on this narrative, positioning radical transparency as the path to institutional adoption. "Look, institutions can audit everything!" became the pitch. But institutions don't want to audit everything - they want privacy. They need to protect customer data, trade secrets, and competitive positioning. No bank wants competitors analyzing their liquidity management. No hedge fund wants front-runners seeing their DeFi positions. No corporation wants suppliers tracking their payment flows. Ethereum's "transparency for institutions" was solving a problem institutions never had while ignoring the one they actually need solved. Worse, both Bitcoin and Ethereum architectures make privacy an afterthought. Privacy can't be bolted onto transparent systems. It has to be built in from the foundation, or it doesn't exist at all. L2s and sidechains tried to solve this but missed the point - scaling transparent transactions faster doesn't make them private. We think zero-knowledge proofs represent the missing piece of the original vision. ZKPs let you prove a computation was performed correctly without revealing the inputs, outputs, or intermediate states. This is the breakthrough that makes the cypherpunk dream technically feasible. For the first time, you can have verifiable computation with perfect privacy. More importantly, you can compute locally and prove globally - executing your transaction privately on your own device, then submit a proof to the network. No global recomputation. No shared state visible to everyone. Just cryptographic proof that the computation was valid. The Aleo L1 implements this vision in its complete form. Private transactions, private smart contracts, and private data - all while maintaining global consensus and cryptographic verifiability. Users control not just their assets, but their information. Applications can compute sensitive business logic locally, then prove it was executed correctly without revealing any details to the network. This is what crypto was always supposed to become: programmable money that preserves privacy by default, not as an afterthought. Bitcoin gave us decentralized money. Ethereum gave us programmable money. Aleo gives us dencentralized, programmable, private money - the synthesis the original vision always required. It's programability enables it to have compliance features too, so that applications built on it can preserve user privacy and stay compliant in their jurisdiction. Most importantly, it gives both institutions and individuals the same fundamental privacy rights and computational sovereignty. A bank's private transaction has the same cryptographic guarantees as yours. A corporation's confidential smart contract runs with the same privacy as a personal application. No special privileges, no institutional backdoors, no regulatory exemptions. The cypherpunks didn't dream of transparent blockchains analyzed by chain analysis companies and regulated by transaction monitoring. They dreamed of cryptography replacing institutional trust. Aleo make that dream technically possible for the first time. And Provable is the company that’s building it all. We have 1091 followers. Follow and watch us flip the script (we ship every week). Or bookmark this post and check in 5 years. Either way, we are inevitable.

Privacy is the #1 area where crypto is way behind where it clearly needs to be That’s where the next 10x improvements and 0 to 1 moments will be Not scalability