The Provable team is happy to announce a new version of the snarkOS Aleo implementation. Aleo is a cryptocurrency enabling developers to build cryptographically secure dApps.

You can already use this version on testnet and it is planned to land on mainnet by March 25th, 2025 - at which point you can also download the release from github. Or, if you’re keen to dive in, build from source anytime you want.

Please report any issues you might come across!

What's new in v3.4.x

Performance improvements for end users

The snarkVM library now avoids synthesis of imported deployments, leading to an exponential speedup in prover time. Previously, when trying to deploy a program with many imports, synthesis time could take many hours - now it will be done in seconds. Let’s explain.

Synthesis is the process of transforming high level aleo instructions to a set of constraints (expressed in R1CS). As a result of this synthesis, transaction execution can be proved using zk-SNARKs. Even transactions expressing truly enormous state updates are small, can be verified ultra-fast, and, most importantly, keep user data private from the network. Previously, for every deployment, every imported function was synthesized; even if those imports had already been previously deployed and their constraint representation was known. The fix entailed refactoring the AleoVM to skip full circuit synthesis for imports and to produce “dummy” outputs with consistent record nonces for imported functions, allowing synthesis of the root function to continue.

Performance improvements for validators

Validator block production is much faster due to caching of fee verification, faster Merkle root computation and generally more greedy verification of executions. These speedups are an essential part of scaling up the validator set in future releases.

API changes

Support was added for GET /{network}/block/{height}/header in this PR. With this it is possible to query only the headers for blocks. This will reduce both bandwidth and payload sizes for the one parsing the result.

Other changes

The validator and client syncing logic has improved documentation and is being refactored bit by bit, allowing future releases to introduce further speed improvements.

This release, there is no update required for Leo, the programming language allowing you to write, deploy and execute programs on Aleo. Several exciting updates are underway, so stay tuned.

The full changelog can be found here:

• https://github.com/ProvableHQ/snarkVM/compare/v1.3.0...3ced248

• https://github.com/ProvableHQ/snarkOS/compare/v3.3.2...ac316221d

Contributors to v3.4.x

A big thank you to all the contributors!

@acoglio

@d0cd

@elderhammer

@giddie

@ljedrz

@joske

@kpandl

@meetrick

@niklaslong

@raphexion

@raychu86

@ungaro

@vicsn

@zosorock