Introduction to zLearn

Learn how to build private decentralized applications on Aleo

In 2009, for the first time, a community of developers came up with a solution to enable peer-to-peer payments without the need for a central authority to validate transactions: Bitcoin.

This new decentralized system allowed permissionless, verifiable exchanges of value. It did so by introducing a unique consensus mechanism to add new transactions to an existing immutable public ledger. Everyone can then verify the validity of these transactions since they are all public.

Bitcoin paved the way for other ledgers, each with its own extra features. In particular, one caught the world's attention - Ethereum - by allowing users to deploy smart contracts: arbitrary sets of instructions executed by network peers. These programs enabled a wide range of use cases, such as creating custom currencies or developing applications where users can exchange those currencies without needing to trust a centralized authority.

Since then, the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry has been at the center of a significant transformation in finance, payments, identity, gaming... The list of disrupted sectors goes on. However, an important limitation has remained. Because transaction verification relies on their content being public, traditional blockchain data is visible to everyone. Give someone your address to receive funds, and they will be able to retrace all your past transactions as well as your current balance. This limitation, along with the problem of scalability of decentralized ledgers, are major issues that need to be solved for crypto to practically transform real-world industries.

While some blockchains, such as Zcash, proposed a solution for making transaction data private while maintaining verifiability, they still lacked programmability. But in 2018, a group of researchers published a paper describing how to enable decentralized private execution: ZEXE. The implementation of this paper led to the creation of a new blockchain: Aleo.

This course will guide you on how to build private decentralized applications on Aleo. From understanding blockchain core concepts to writing smart contracts, debugging and deploying them, and acquiring the right tools for connecting your app to a frontend, you should have everything you need to begin your builder journey on Aleo.

This course requires no prior knowledge of blockchain. It is aimed at engineers with a mathematical background and experience in programming.