RECAP - What is the Purpose of Deploy Incentives?

Aleo launched Deploy Incentives on Testnet3 Phase III to encourage developers to write and deploy applications on the network. We aimed to drive organic use of the Aleo protocol and create an initial set of useful programs for our on-chain program registry. Deploy Incentives are critical because they encourage builders to demonstrate their ability to harness the power of zero-knowledge (ZK) technology to build private, programmable applications on the Web. In particular, we wanted people to start building these applications using our zk-enabled domain-specific language (DSL) and compiler, Leo. This allows us to introduce Leo to a wide range of developers and to test the limits of what is currently possible to build.

Program Scope

Deploy Incentives are open to applications of all types. There is NO use case or application that is out of scope. What’s most important is if the app demonstrates the core properties of the Aleo network and how well it fulfills our submission criteria.

Below is a list of the five application categories for Deploy Incentives. Applicants could deploy a program based on one of these categories or something entirely different.

Gaming

  1. Turn-based games (e.g., Battleship)
  2. Table games (e.g., Poker)
  3. Role Playing Games (e.g., Dark Forest)

Identity & Authentication

  1. Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) & verifiable credentials (VCs)
  2. Namespace resolvers (e.g., ENS)
  3. KYC/AML

Zero-Knowledge Decentralized Finance (ZeFi)

  1. Dark pools and mixers
  2. Decentralized exchanges (e.g., Uniswap, dYdX)
  3. Lending protocols (e.g., Aave)
  4. Stablecoins (e.g., USDC, DAI)

Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (zkML)

  1. Single/multi-layer neural networks
  2. Computational integrity
  3. ZK anomaly/fraud detection

Voting & Governance

  1. Private on-chain voting (e.g., MACI)
  2. Private DAO infrastructure

Submission Review Process

For reviewing submissions, we have a committee comprised of 25 ambassadors and 6 Aleo core team members. The ambassadors were selected based on their status within our community. The Aleo core team members we selected from our developer relations team.

All review committee members received a shortlist of 50 qualifying submissions. This shortlist was curated by systematically eliminating submissions that did not meet the minimum requirements outlined in our application form.

It should be noted that ambassadors reviewed all 50 qualifying submissions, while only 30 were reviewed by both ambassadors AND Aleo core team members. Since fewer Aleo core team members were involved in this review process, we only required them to review the 30 submissions with the highest ambassador scores from the original list of 50.

Each submission contained the following information:

Our committee members are responsible for (1) reviewing an assigned group of projects from the shortlist of qualifying applications and (2) ordering the top 10 submissions. Below are step-by-step instructions on how to conduct reviews.

Step 1 - Carefully review each submission [ Video Tutorial ]

Each ambassador will be given a set of 5 applications to score, and each Aleo core team member will be given 2 applications to score. When reviewing an application, please make sure to:

  1. Read the README file in the GitHub repository. This README file will have detailed information on the project and what the team built for Deploy Incentives.
  2. Read the project description/additional information if provided by the applicant.
  3. Watch the demo video of the project. It is essential to visualize the project's functioning.