It's been an exciting month at Aleo! First and foremost, it's been amazing to witness the growth of this community. In just over a month, we've doubled the number of verified Discord members. Thank you all so much for continuing to spread the word about the exciting things we're doing. The team looks forward to meeting many of you in the increasing number of in-person events we're hosting worldwide. On the technical side, we're working on updating our consensus algorithm to enable decentralized validators and staking. As most of you know, we are adapting Bullshark/Narwhal (two algorithms pioneered by Meta for Aleo. Bullshark/Narwhal consensus has a strong body of research behind it and has two major advantages over other BFT-based staking systems, such as Tendermint:
Performance - more executions can be processed by the network per second due to the unique nature of the Narwhal mempool
Decentralization - the theoretical upper limit of participating validators is higher than other PoS systems
Bullshark/Narwhal is already in production, with both Sui and Aptos using it for their networks. However, we are facing some challenges adapting it to our stack due to the privacy-preserving nature of our VM. These challenges have caused some unanticipated delays on our mainnet roadmap. The engineering team is currently working hard over the course of the next month on a new validator node implementation for running Bullshark/Narwhal for the next month. This node will allow for wider participation in the Aleo network consensus, starting with the 50 pre-selected validators and growing from there. Importantly, we still anticipate mainnet launch by the end of the year. Note that while this work is ongoing through August, there may be some instability on the current network. Our infrastructure and engineering teams will still provide support and respond to bug reports. However, since implementing the new consensus algorithm is the priority for the next month, we ask for your patience in the event of an unplanned network outage or other instability. Privacy is a critical human right in the digital age and is an essential prerequisite for an actually-secure internet. Thank you very much for being a great community as we count down the final months leading up to mainnet launch!