Strengthening Aleo's Products
Introduction
Aleo engaged Equilibrium in September 2020 to apply our extensive experience in blockchain technologies and Rust development to the snarkOS and Leo projects. This case study will review the improvements Equilibrium has contributed to Aleo's products. These improvements have enabled Aleo to bring its technologies to market quickly: from a proof-of-concept to a scalable public release in under a year.
Aleo's Platform
Aleo is a platform for secure, private execution of programs, such as smart contracts. Aleo stands apart from other distributed exchanges and blockchain technologies by offering robust cryptographic privacy through zero- knowledge executions.1 Equilibrium's development priorities focuses on snarkOS, a decentralized operating system for private applications, which forms the backbone of the Aleo platform, and Leo, the programming language developed for the Aleo platform.
Opportunity
Equilibrium's efforts on the snarkOS and Leo projects include significant refactoring of the core networking components, and implementing industry best practices across the product development lifecycle. Our team is providing expert guidance regarding cryptographic networking protocol design, development best practices and infrastructure build-out. These efforts have enabled Aleo to boost network performance dramatically, optimize memory consumption and exceed their node scaling targets.
Timeline
Beginning in late September 2020, Equilibrium reviewed the codebase and began making improvements to metrics and logging, while working with Aleo to identify priorities and develop a roadmap. Our team worked quickly to develop and test a comprehensive refactoring of core networking components to hit Aleo's scaling targets by late November. We made significant memory optimizations and implemented protocol security measures by early December.
Improvements Achieved
Network Refactor
Our team took a close look at snarkOS's core networking components as
a priority, and coordinated with Aleo on a fundamental refactoring.
Equilibrium recommended and implemented a protocol change to secure
the handshake2 between nodes.
We developed a full simulated network environment to ensure the
stability of each new change, and were able to achieve robust node
connectivity under disruptive network conditions.
We carefully analyzed the network activities related to blockchain
transactions and made several improvements to blockchain
synchronization.
Performance Analysis
Development efforts have been guided by scenario testing and routine
performance analysis. Data from these tests allowed us to resolve a
number of out-of-memory conditions, and to optimize total memory
consumption over the lifetime of a node.
Continuous Integration
Equilibrium has improved the continuous integration and testing
environments with additional scenario testing covering scalability,
fuzzing, code linting, and other best practices.
Impact Review
Immediate Engagement
Equilibrium's team regularly contributes to industry-leading
blockchain technologies and was able to get started right away
contributing code. Working with the Aleo team, Equilibrium identified
development priorities, established a project roadmap, and assigned
dedicated internal resources.
Industry Best Practices
Equilibrium established a solid development foundation based on
industry best practices quickly and efficiently in an active codebase.
We stabilized and extended the continuous integration, adding
automatic code linting with Clippy, benchmarking, and scalability
analysis. Our team quickly began providing code review of open source
community contributions to snarkOS while coordinating all development
progress closely with the Aleo team.
Conclusion
Equilibrium's expertise in developing distributed systems gives Aleo
the strong foundation it needs to compete in today's ultra-competitive
layer one blockchain markets.
About Aleo
Aleo is a platform for secure, private applications. Using blockchain technology and zero-knowledge cryptography, Aleo offers users a world of applications that are both personal and private.
About Equilibrium
Equilibrium designs and builds core infrastructure for the decentralized web. We love hard engineering problems in decentralised technologies and we get stuff to production.
Footnotes