Traditional blockchains typically compensate developers for minor computations, such as completing a DeFi transaction correctly or participating in an airdrop. But what if you could receive rewards for substantial computations that have a meaningful impact? From modeling climate changes to conducting in-depth learning tasks, your Proofs of Useful Work (performing extensive computations) could contribute to real-world changes.

If you're interested in assisting people in solving significant, verifiable mathematical problems or running physical simulations using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and receiving instant rewards for your efforts, we encourage you to submit a proposal for a Proof of Useful Work Blueprint Grant (RFP).

Issues Addressed with ZKPs:

Computer scientists typically categorize problems based on their theoretical complexity, ranging from simple tasks like optimizing a supermarket route to find the cheapest bread to complex challenges like determining the shortest path through a list of cities.

Many institutions and organizations are already dedicated to finding solutions to complex problems. Scientific projects like BOINC at the University of California, Berkeley, utilize collaborative computing to study and research diseases, climate change, pulsars, and a variety of other scientific investigations.

Another initiative, folding@home, allows developers to contribute their computational power to combat global health threats like COVID-19, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer.

There are even more issues that require computational solutions, including:

Improving our understanding of celestial objects and physics.

Deep learning.

Climate modeling.

Medical and biological modeling, such as protein folding.

Even SAT competitions involve computational challenges.

The more significant the problem, the more computations are necessary to solve it. You can perform large—very large—computations within Leo, Aleo's programming language, using ZKPs. Some problems demand nearly unlimited computational resources, making it more efficient to delegate their solutions to trusted and untrusted parties (ZKPs enable swift and secure verification of the latter).

While systems like BOINC and folding@home play a critical role in valuable work, they do not financially reward contributors for their solutions. Furthermore, many previous attempts to reward "Proofs of Useful Work" often focused on narrowly specialized problems (see Primecoin).

The Aleo Proof of Useful Work Blueprint Grant offers a distinct approach. The Aleo network already recognizes and compensates developers for creating ZKPs. Now you can enable others to provide rewards for solving computational problems that have a meaningful impact.