This past June, our core team announced the first iteration of the Aleo Community Grants Program. Our intent was to provide community members with opportunities to contribute to the Aleo open-source ecosystem and fulfill our vision of creating a private and personal experience for everyone on the web.
Since the program's launch, we've received many applications and approved some for funding. In the coming months we'll be working closely with our grantees to build projects and create content that showcases the power of Aleo and that accelerates the growth of our ecosystem.
Since we launched this program, we realized that we could also take advantage of these grant projects to improve Aleo's domain-specific language, Leo, by encouraging developers to contribute.
For context, Leo is the first formally verified compiler for zero-knowledge proofs and is able to convert a developer's high-level code into zero-knowledge circuits. It is capable of abstracting low-level cryptographic concepts and integrating private applications into any stack. It also introduces high-level syntax that makes it easy to write and intuitive to express logic in zero-knowledge. From our new layer-1 blockchain which immutably stores programs and data, to our development studio and online REPL, we provide a complete set of tools for the developer who wants to build the next-gen web.
In order to encourage outside contributions to Leo, we are excited to announce the launch of the Aleo Feature Bounties Program.
Whether you're a seasoned compiler engineer, an adept web developer or a weekend hacker, we encourage anybody to start working on a feature bounty. Our goal is to take advantage of our very talented developer community to help build features that YOU want to see to make Leo the go-to language for developing with zero-knowledge.
For this initial program Aleo has committed $1M in total funding from its treasury. This funding will be allocated to both the Feature Bounties and Community Grants Programs. Depending on the size and complexity of the feature, each bounty will have a different price. If a feature ends up being more work than initially anticipated we will consider raising the price. Payments for feature bounties can be made in your choice of USD, USDC, BTC or ZEC. After the Aleo mainnet launch, we plan to expand that list to include Aleo credits as well.
Aside from the money you would receive for completing a feature bounty, you will also be recognized within our community. This will be reflected in the form of placement on our community leaderboard and attainment of Aleo Achievements. We will be sharing more details on these initiatives soon.
