Date: January 20, 2022

Participants: Alex, Anthony, Fabiano, Sam, Jeanine, Errol, Nick

Quick Summary: General updates on the ecosystem at large and in the New Year (phase 1 setup ceremony, incentivized testnet, Discord revamp, ambassador program)

Notes:

Key Points:

• The incentives for the testnet will end two weeks earlier on January 31st rather than on February 15th
• We are going to award 125 Aleo credits to every miner who was not able to mine a block (snapshot taken about 2 weeks ago)
• 2,200 total contributors from phase1 of the setup ceremony, the largest ceremony of all time!
• There will be a phase2 of setup ceremony for those who couldn’t particiapte in phase1 (timeline TBD)
• In the process of sending out NFTs (Universal & Outer will be finished by the end of the month, Inner by the start of next month)
• First three mining pools that submit and meet requirements will receive Aleo credits (one user has been awarded the 1st mining pool)
• Discord redesign is 90% complete
• We will be finalizing an official name for the community, will receive community input
• Aleo Community Grants will have a website and details will be much more clear in the immediate future (Disclaimer: will be able to write your application in Leo but deploying we will need to implement more functionality improvements on Leo)
• Ambassador Program still under development and will timeline to be released on February 1st.

Notes:

• Incentivized Testnet
  • going to end incentives for the testnet two weeks earlier
    • the incentives will end on January 31st
  • the testnet will still continue to run, blocks will still be reduced but no incentives
  • by ending early we are going to save some credits and are behind by the allocated credits we had set aside for the mainnet
    • we want to award 125 Aleo credits to every miner on the network when we took the netowork snapshot about 2 weeks ago
    • want to give people rewards for actually participating
    • we want to allocate a large chunk of tokens (8M tokens) for fastest PoSW implementations
      • think the stakes are very high and don’t want to have the same issues of consensus on validation that we saw on the testnet
  • success: strong community support (7,500 distinct mining nodes); great activity on our GitHub (contributions), top miner produces 10,000 proofs/second; identified and fixed many critical bugs (timestamp manipulation attack to gain advantage); several mining pools up and running
    • Haruka has been officially named the first pool
  • bad: quadratic mining didn’t work in distributing tokens more widely (set off by top 100 miners); vast disparity between top 2 miners and everybody else
• Aleo Community Grants Program
  • we will have a website where information will be posted
  • the process of applications will be much more clear
  • many grant applicant ideas are out of scope due to the current state of Aleo’s network
    • Disclaimer: will be able to write your application in Leo but deploying we will need to implement more functionality improvements on Leo