In the summer of 2022, an old country house on the edge of the Cotswolds in England hosted an extraordinary meeting. A small team of developers and designers travelling from three continents converged on this tranquil spot overlooking the Severn valley and the Welsh hills beyond. Over the course of a week, the individuals in that house shared an experience, an idea, and a vision.

Those seven long, warm days, filled with creative thinking and deep (oh so deep) technical dives, will be recorded in the annuls as when the Aldea Computer¹ was born.

For the team that gathered that week, their story goes back further. We are a team of blockchain veterans. Between us, we have built: a L2 token protocol that at times processed many more transactions per second than the entire Ethereum network; a much-loved crypto wallet with best-in-class user experience; and a number of consumer-facing Web3 apps and startups.

In Aldea, we are building the L1 blockchain we wanted ourselves. We've created a smart contract programming model that you can learn in an afternoon and offers an unrivalled developer experience. And we're gunning for the kind of scale that will cause the eyes of those in this industry to widen, and jaws to drop.

Almost a year has passed since that pivotal week. Since then, the team has been in hyper-focussed, heads-down build mode. But it's time to start lifting the veil and revealing what we've been creating as we gradually gear up for our Testnet launch.

That's what this blog is about. The Aldea Computer – what it is and why you should care about it. I'll show how you can start learning about and building with Aldea. I'll share the thinking behind our design decisions, and comment on the world of blockchains, Web3 and crypto more generally.

Thank you for reading. I am lebrunel. Please follow and subscribe.