As August is coming to an end we can tell that definitely will remember it with incredible projects that visited SatoshiClub. And today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Aleph.im. The AMA took place on August 28 and our guests were Jonathan Schemoul, founder of the aleph.im project and Claudio Pascariello, UX/UI designer.
The total reward pool was 1500$ and has been splitted in 3 parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.
Part 1 — introduction and questions from the Telegram&Bitcointalk community
Serg | Satoshi Club: Dear community, our guests are from @alephim. Welcome!
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of our AMA series. Our guests today are @Jonnyjonnyjon and @claudio_101 . Welcome guys. Thanks for joining us 😊
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Hello! Welcome on board, nice to have you all here 🙂
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: Hi everybody!
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Hello Satoshi Club! Happy to be here! 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: And @LuisMe7 that will help us moderate the AMA 😊 @Jonnyjonnyjon @claudio_101 please tell us a few words about yourself and the story behind AlephIM, how did it all get started?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: I am Jonathan Schemoul, alias Moshe Malawach, founder of the aleph.im project.
Before aleph.im I was a freelance developer and electronic engineer, designing software for big banks, hardware for startups. While starting to work on blockchain applications I realized there was a missing link, a missing part of the ecosystem: an infrastructure layer between the user and the blockchains, that would be decentralized and allowing to build way bigger dApps: aleph.im was born.
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: I’m a UX/UI designer and have a small agency with my partner. Worked for several banks and other design agencies on brandings. Now working full time on Aleph with Moshe
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Sounds interesting. What kind of hardware?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Board with small micro controllers, used for examples in device for in store engagement. Like when you open a perfume box, a video starts on a screen, information sent wirelessly (this particular example from my older clients will get updated to send information to the aleph.im network in the future by the way!)
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Was it prototyping? Or the devices were used for real?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: The devices were used for real… there are thousands of stores worldwide of very big brands with devices I designed. Also other things, on the industrial and IoT aspects, also in production
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Solid. Thanks for sharing. In the first part we have questions from the community collected via our platform. Since the introductions are ready, I propose to jump to Q1. What do you say @Jonnyjonnyjon @claudio_101?
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: Perfect!
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Let’s go! 🙂
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Let’s go with part 1!
Q1 from bitcointalk user pedronino
What is MyAleph beta? How exactly are you replacing the centralized cloud systems?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: MyAleph beta is a personal storage dApp, allowing a user to replace let’s say Google Drive and Evernote… It uses the aleph.im network as a storage medium, for both files and database. It’s also fully encrypted end to end. It means that the data of the user isn’t owned by a single company, and that he has full control over it. Link to this dApp: my-beta.aleph.im
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Can you elaborate how can the user control his/ her data?
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Sounds good!
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: It’s posted by the user, on a decentralized network (aleph.im), the user encrypts it client side and decrypts it when needed, no one else has access to this data unless it’s specifically made public.The cool part is that it’s using the address key pair of the user: with his ethereum, nuls or neo address
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: I assume it will run on mobile devices as well @claudio_101? Does it use any gas when storing data on the network?
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: That’s the whole Idea. Now it’s only a beta with minimum UX requirements. But we will start on real production ready interface after we launch the new website. In the following weeks. The mobile app btw is also planned 😉
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Good news. It’s a must these days 😊
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: no, none… you can try it yourself right now with an account that holds nothing, it will work! all actions are instant too
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: So you expect it to be fully operational within the following weeks?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: It is fully operational, just not feature complete 🙂 I expect a feature complete version this year or start of next year (we want quite a lot of features!) Release early, release often is our moto
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Full speed ahead
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Don’t you have an approximate date for it’s complete launch?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: I consider it already launched 🙂 As for the mobile app I’d say around November. Full synchronisation of folders November-December. MyAleph is just one of the dApps of the network
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: Most people think that we still have to start on things but we have a working product. MVP but working
Q2 from bitcointalk user jpsarma
In
your Development roadmap, you have mentioned about Specialized and
hybrid nodes in Q3-Q4 this year. Why do you require 2 types of nodes
and how will these nodes work?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Specialized means only storage, or only database or only computing for example. Hybrid means that they do multiple actions at the same time. It will be concurrent with Sharding (nodes that are on one channel only). Let’s say you have a bunch of nodes for file storage, another bunch dedicated to be dartabase API endpoints for your dApp channel. This channel will kinda live on it own, with no noisy neighbors
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: So hybrid one is more complete
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Yes 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Like Google Drive + Evernote, right?:blush: Not 2 separate services?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Actually on MyAleph it’s one dApp in its own channel, all features of that dApp are on that channel. But let’s imagine you have a very big trading DEX sending data, hundred of thousands of TX per day, you don’t want your dApp to be disturbed by that traffic and nodes handling your dApp won’t be full because of it. That’s the channel sharding. Hybrid nodes are interesting because some features can be only on some nodes of a channel, and channels can share nodes
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Like Uniswap, for example
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: yeah or our partners Serum, Jarvis or Orion 🙂
Q3 from Telegram user @bitociok
You
say that you “are dedicated to provide secure storage and
computing to dApps on all blockchains.”
Is the storage on
blockchain? right now it’s impossible based on the current blockchain
technologies. How about computing? How can dapps get that?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: The storage is on the aleph.im network itself. we store hashes on the blockchains. On computing, we are working on virtual machines based on docker like containers and web assembly. The idea is to provide serverless computing to dApps in the same way they would use “amazon lambda” or similar providers. While still getting blockchain-like security and audit of history (based on hash chains, per vm)
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: It is centralized, right? I mean the data is stored on centralized mediums, right? Hashes – on the chain
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: The network is a decentralized network, so it’s decentralized 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: If I upload a movie/ video, where will it be stored?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: it will be chunked, and chunks will end up on multiple nodes of the network, if it’s encrypted, only you and people you share it with will be able to put it back together correctly
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Oh, got it. Like a torrent, right?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: yeah somehow 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Got it 😊So just to summarize, everything happens on the blockchain 😊All parts involved in the process
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Not really, hashes are stored on the blockchain
We store data on the network (compatible with IPFS if needed) and store hashes of message lists on the blockchains. All messages are to be signed by an address of one of the supported blockchain
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: visual does the trick. Thank you
Q4 from Telegram user @Aleurich
How
do you control the total supply if Aleph has many chains? Do you have
the same number of tokens in each chain?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: We have the same number of tokens on each chain. Tokens that are on another chain are locked in each chain.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: That’s interesting. Could you elaborate? How does this happen?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: This way we have our total supply of 500M tokens (1B original total, 500M burnt). there are pools for cross chain tokens. When a token is swapped from another chain it moves from that pool to the target address. And when you swap to another chain, you basically send your token with an information on the destination to that pool on the origin chain
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Are there other projects that use this approach?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: A lot yes… It’s either this or mint/burn on each chain to do it. The risk with the mint/burn way is that you can end up with an infinite supply if something goes wrong. This is why we’ve chosen the cross-chain pool and total supply on all chains approach
Q5 from Telegram username @nyo_cant
A
few weeks ago, ALEPH max supply was reduced from 1,000M to 500M,
which is a huge decrease indeed. What where the main reasons behind
that reduction and what consequences will this have
short-/medium-term?
Will this be the final max supply or there are any odds that supply
may change again?
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: As we are self funded and didn’t do an ICO it wasn’t necessary to have this amount of tokens anymore. So we burnt te amount that we put aside for seed rounds and an ico
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: (ICO or private sale or any kind of sale…)
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Why did you decide that you don’t need a public sale of any type anymore?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]:
Here is our new token distribution
It was the bear market, we had people with the token from staking on NULS or from an airdrop. We realized all VC or sales we could have done weren’t good deals for our holders or for the project. So we decided to go ahead like we were.
After all, we were self funded for a year and a half already 🙂 Also, with dApps live and companies building on the product, they needed tokens. So a small uniswap pool was a good way to get some tokens in their hand
Serg | Satoshi Club: yes, I’ve noticed more and more projects which decide not to go with a public/private sale. this is good for the tokenomics
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: That was a great decision
Serg | Satoshi Club: uniswap changed everything in crypto in the last year 😀 uniswap is everywhere
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: To be honest, I didn’t realize what I was starting doing this :sweat_smile:
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: So finance-wise the project is sustainable, right?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Yes, completely sustainable now 🙂 We have funding for a while
Serg | Satoshi Club: how big is your team btw? what expenses do you have?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: We are more than 20, but most have day jobs (I didn’t, always been full time even self funded!). We have grown from a self funded opensource project to a bigger project with a funding. A lot of team members are now transitionning to full time.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: So that means less expenses for the team. That’s nice
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: We try to keep our expenses as lean as possible. We want to have funding to keep us afloat for a few years in case a bear market was to restart (which I don’t think, but I have no crystal ball)
Serg | Satoshi Club: the question about bear market is not if but when 🙂 it always come after a bull market
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: That’s like the market works…
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: A few of our key team members by the way

Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Such a great and experienced team
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: (from the excellent blockfyre report!)
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Nice. You have photos :blush: It has become trendy for the projects to go anonymous with the team. Seen a few projects like this lately
Serg | Satoshi Club: aren’t you anonymous, Irina? 😁
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Nope 😊
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: She is a real life Jedi master! :stuck_out_tongue:
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: I’m just shy
Serg | Satoshi Club: shall the force be with you )))
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Words are my sword 😊Beware, mortals 😊
Serg | Satoshi Club: sharp words/sword 😁
Q6 from Telegram user @clara_eriksen
How
many blockchains do you support and what is the reason someone might
need access to several blockchains simultaneously, especially if the
blockchain is fast and cheap
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: We currently support four blockchains, NULS, Ethereum, Neo and Binance Chain…
As for the reason why, composability is key in the decentralized finance, and in the real world too. You need to be able to be interoperable.We want dApp developers from all blockchains to use our network. Also, actions are instant and fee less on aleph.im, so we don’t really care if the underlying chain is fast and cheap. We want it to be the most adopted one.
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: As a dApp developer on Aleph you will have access to not one but all connected blockchain. While if you develop on one specific chain you will only get the userbase of that chain. Other chain users wont be able to use your dApp.
Serg | Satoshi Club: can I build one dapp on 2 blockchains simultaneously? and can it function on both of them simultaneously? I am not really a dev, not sure if this makes sense 😁
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: if you use smart contract, you’ll need to have the same features on both, but why not, and aleph.im will support both… if you build your dApp on aleph.im itself, you’ll accept users from all connected chains with no specific effort
Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community
Q1 from Telegram user Likkaa Azzahra
What does Aleph.im think about solving issues that the DeFi ecosystem still can’t solve? and why that is the problem important?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: We want to decentralize the last mile of DeFI: most decentralized finance applications still have some centralized parts, like order books, matching engines, databases… We offer those project to help them and decentralize this as well, so their product is trully trustless and decentralized
Q2 from Telegram user @thebastaboy
During the COVID-19, many projects were strongly affected. What strategies did Aleph.im have to conduct the negative impact of COVID-19?
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: I will take the less technical questions like this one. As we are an open source project and everybody is working from their own safe place. We were not affected by this. Communication went just forward as usual using chats or video calls
Q3 from Telegram user @yzmoney
How did you get so many good partners like orion, serum, BCDiploma , defipie ,jarvis network? how are they complementing to the success of Aleph ?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: They needed to decentralized parts of their infrastructure, and benefit from our decentralized database solution mostly. Also, some of these projects plan to go cross chain, and using only ethereum smart contract isn’t possible when you want to access users of other chains. Moving their data storage and logic on aleph.im gets them access to more chains.
Q4 from Telegram user @nayanankit
It seems that ALEPH shares a trait with ETH: it has no maximum supply. How can unlimited inflation benefit/harm ALEPH in the long term?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: This has been changed with the last tokenomics updates. Our maximum supply is now 500M tokens.
Q5 from Telegram user @Daptika
Aleph.im already support four blockchain. Which is NULS, Ethereum, NEO and Binance chain. Any plan to add more Blockchain in future? What’s the benefits to access different Blockchain simultaneously?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: We are working on ecosystems mostly right now. Supporting the address and signature structures of ecosystems grants us access to their whole user base. We are working currently on Tezos, Polkadot/Substrate and Cosmos ecosystems.
The benefit is that we can offer a service to developers and users of all chains, and adding support for those users to existing dApps and clients.
Q6 from Telegram user @imelruy
The price of the ALEPH token has been rising and bringing profits to investors. What are the major utilities of the token that should make investors hold the token for the long run?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]:

Here is a quick overview of the uses of our Token: Synchronization fees, processing power and storage payment. As a side note we will start staking and nodes incentives in the coming months as well.
Q7 from Telegram user @LleeKuanYew
What are your plans for the next 6 months? Can you share some next major events of ALEPH project? Which developments we can expect from ALEPH project in next years?
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: We will be working on several things. First of all the aleph nodes they will launch Q3/Q4. Making sure to deliver on the partner project from Phantasma, Jarvis, Orion, Serum, … Some will use the same tech others need extra development from both side. Another issue is that our website is very basic and hope to finish the following weeks with a better one where we explain better who we are, what we do and what we will deliver in the future.
Q8 from Telegram user @imelruy
Can the confirmation times on the blockchain be extended for maximum security when “Aleph.im” messages are processed by the network? What are the factors affecting approval times?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: For maximum security, for virtual machines typically, you’ll be able to chose a specific chain to be the source of “truth” on message ordering for that virtual machine. One the message is commited on chain, no way to change the messages orders. Until then, sync nodes could in theory change message orders.

Here is the typical message processing workflow so you understand timing involved
Q9 from Telegram user @hassokor
The comission rate while staking Aleph is 99%!! And how is the schedule of this reward program and what is the minimal amount of Aleph to stake? How it be profitable?
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: You are refering to the pocm staking from NULS. In the future this will likely not continue. We will focus and incentivise on the liquidity pools and our own nodes but for now we will keep the pocm nodes as it is a great platform.
Q10 from Telegram user @Agz18
How can I integrate my Dapps to Aleph.im database to get full service of Aleph.im service providing security to my dapps!?
Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: You can use the Javascript API with the documentation available here https://aleph-im.github.io/aleph-js/guide/getting-started.html and just add calls to it to read and write on the database with your users credential/web3 provider on the browser 🙂
Q11 from Telegram user X Sang [Originatecoin Ambassador]
The crypto world is becoming overcrowded with blockchain projects and tokens, what makes ALEPH different from other projects?
Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: That’s the reason we didn’t build yet another blockchain but chose to connect existing ones and decentralize that part that most of them are still working on, storage, computing and DID
Part 3 – Quiz Results
In the final part we tested your knowledge in terms of Aleph.im. They’ve prepared 4 questions for this part. The total reward pool for quiz was 900$.
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[…] public interest in aleph.im rapidly grew, Moshe was invited to many AMAs including SatoshiClub, Kucoin, Gains Associates, and ID Crypto […]