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Aleph Zero (AZERO) deep dive: microcap marvel

What happens when three maths PhDs look into the blockchain “trilemma” of scalability, security and decentralisation? They add privacy into the mix, make it a “quadrilemma”, and solve it.

Harry Hamburg
Harry Hamburg
22 min read
Aleph Zero (AZERO) deep dive: microcap marvel

Crypto, like any rich, burgeoning industry is full of chancers, conmen, scammers, mercenaries… and a small number of people with exceptional skills, talent and vision.

It seems like Aleph Zero was created by four of the latter.

The project was co-founded by three maths PhDs and a tech marketer with experience working with some of the top companies in the world.

The team now consists of 40+ people with equally impressive accolades.

Aleph Zero’s website notes:

The list of previous accomplishments of the Aleph Zero team includes ACM ICPC World Finals, first prize in International Mathematics Competition, and Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship.
On the business front, our employees and contractors gained experience at organizations such as IBM, ABB, Stellar, Codewise, Capgemini, ING Bank, Admind Agency, TIBCO Software, Google and Uber.

The reason I’m bringing up the team and their accolades so early in this deep dive is because it’s more than a little unusual.

And in a crypto that’s ranked in the 3,000s by market cap, it’s unprecedented.

You see, Aleph Zero’s current market cap is currently around $200 million.

And, even fully diluted, its market cap would be under $400 million. So this isn’t simply a case of Aleph Zero looking like a tiny crypto while really being a giant because the supply is still mostly locked up.

It really is a tiny crypto. It’s currently only available on one exchange. And even if you scour CoinDesk, Coin Telegraph and Reddit’s biggest crypto sub, /r/cryptocurrency, you’ll barely see anything about it.

And why would you? There are 3,000+ bigger cryptos out there to be looking at.

That’s what’s so strange about Aleph Zero. It feels like a crypto project with a market cap in the tens of billions, yet it’s tiny.

In fact, the main thing that gives me pause about this project is that it’s almost too good to be true. It’s too slick. It’s too professional. Its team is too impressive. Its claims are too much.

For example, not only does Aleph Zero claim to have solved the trilemma, of security, scalability and decentralisation. But it even added privacy into the mix, turned it into a quadrilemma… and then solved it anyway.

But what if it really is all true?

What if Aleph Zero has solved the quadrilemma, what if its project really is that good, and what if it’s still so small simply because it’s still so new?

Well in that case we could be looking at an absolute monster in the making, and the next evolution of distributed ledger technology.

I guess it’s time to get on with this deep dive and find out…


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