Date: January 3, 2022

Participants: Alex (left early), Anthony, Sam, Damon

Quick Summary: Provide an update on the current state of Aleo’s incentivized testnet and answer questions from community members

Notes:

Key Points:

• Decided to call a #1 slot in the testnet, they are planning to shutdown their node
• The #2 spot and down are all still in play
• We wanted to even the playing filed and see how distribution of rewards changes with the implementation
• We are still testing mining pools but intend to open up official mining pools this week
• Putting in more contracts for this year for community grants

General Notes:

Questions:

• Possible collaborations with other projects using zkSTARK and zkSNARK?
  • STARKS are a subset of SNARKS, they use a different committment scheme under the hood
  • if we wanted to do, we could swap out everything from SNARK to a variant of STARK
  • we are totally open to collaborating with teams across the space
  • we are attempting to partner with a major zk project
• Is Aleo planning to have third testnet?
  • Can’t say for sure if it will be incentivized
  • But there will be a third testnet
  • Run another one before the mainnet launch that runs transactions, etc.
• What are the incentives of mining pools?
  • If you are a smaller mining node, you have a better probability of mining blocks
  • Pull together hardware and mine more blocks
  • You want to even out the rewards of mining more blocks
• How did the #1 miner agree to shutdown their node?
  • It is out of good will and they will also save money on server costs