My friends, you're about to experience an honest crypto review where I'm taking a hard look at Aleph.im. This project looks to me like it's absolutely going to zero. I want to share a crypto price prediction based on the fact that I don't want you to lose your money in a project that, in my opinion, is obviously terrible. It took me about 15 minutes to learn about it while I was on Twitch, and I immediately saw critical flaws. But when I search for it on YouTube, all I see is what looks like paid hype to me. I don't see anything valuable here. So I'm doing this out of love and respect for you, because I don't want you to get tricked into buying what, to me, looks like worthless crap. And this is about Aleph.im.
The price chart and what it really tells us
If you look at the price chart, the first thing to understand is that most crypto investors are scared off by a chart like this. That means the only way out for most of these projects is blatant market manipulation, which a lot of them definitely do. But even the price chart, unless you have the best technology in crypto, won't stop people from being scared off. So yes, I realize ICP has a price chart that's arguably worse, but it has the best technology in crypto. And when you look at this, only one guy created Aleph. It was so easy to create that one person built it.
The bottom line in crypto, which almost nobody understands yet, is that the tech does matter. In fact, in the long term, the tech is going to be all that matters. So my question is simple: if I buy the Aleph token, am I truly investing in some tech that's going to matter?
Reading the marketing versus the docs
When I go look at what this actually is, I go to the Aleph website. It talks about Aleph being a super cloud, an open source, chain-agnostic network providing decentralized cloud services. If you look at it, it's presented to look like Internet Computer Protocol. You have all these blockchains connecting, and I automatically don't believe it, because something that truly solves real problems is difficult to make.
So I quickly go into the docs, and I find the problem right away. It's an open source, off-chain, peer-to-peer network. That means there's no accountability over which computers they're actually using. How do I know they're not just using a bunch of Amazon or Google Cloud servers? And because it's off-chain, that means holding the token fundamentally doesn't control anything, either by law or by code, on the peer-to-peer network. So when they say it's a decentralized network, but the network is off-chain, who is controlling the off-chain part of the protocol? When I put a website on this off-chain peer-to-peer network, how can I be sure it can't be hacked? I can't. Who controls where my site is hosted? There's no accountability on that one.
Why "off-chain" breaks the whole pitch
So when I'm looking at this, to me it's acting and trying to make itself look like Internet Computer Protocol. ICP is the only network that can do things like run AI models as smart contracts and run AI agents fully on chain. To do that, you have to have everything fully on chain, because anything that's off-chain is running on regular Web2 infrastructure and doesn't have any of the security benefits of the blockchain. That means the token on ICP actually can have everything on chain.
But when Aleph talks about things like autonomous AI on the blockchain, to me this looks blatantly fraudulent. Because if your AI model is not running 100% on-chain, it is not autonomous. It cannot pay for its own computation. The only way AI can run fully on-chain, or in any environment, and actually pay for its own computation, which is required to be autonomous, is to run the whole thing on chain. Then the AI could actually pay for its own compute, the way you can do on an internet computer.
This is what almost all of crypto is doing. I would call it tricking or defrauding. You're talking about things that the actual technology cannot deliver. You are not delivering autonomous AI on the blockchain. You have tokens that are on the blockchain, and then you have an open source, off-chain, peer-to-peer network that is not on the blockchain. It's no more "on the blockchain" than if I built my house, made a puddle in the backyard, and told you my house was on the water. You went to my house and bought it, having never researched it, and you were disgusted to find I had a puddle in the backyard, because technically I have some water in my yard.
What is actually under the hood
So Aleph.im, to me, is a project that misleads investors into thinking it's something really powerful: a Web3 super cloud with AI and AI agents. But the truth, as I see it, is that they've set up everything on regular infrastructure like Amazon, Google, or their own servers. They either bought their own graphics cards or they're literally using someone else's. Then they made a little off-chain protocol that's under their own control. Then they have a token, and the blockchain itself is actually on Cosmos, because it's tagged right there in the Cosmos ecosystem.
So the actual blockchain itself is just some Cosmos-based chain running the Cosmos SDK, which means the blockchain itself is almost incapable of doing any meaningful amount of computation, any more than a calculator can. Ethereum and something like Cosmos are world computers about as much as a calculator is. Yes, a calculator does computation, but a calculator is not running your website on chain, and a calculator is not running AI on chain.
So this, to me, is a project of misdirection. They make you think one thing, and the fact is it does almost nothing. Almost everything it claims is not actually decentralized, because whoever controls all this off-chain stuff and controls how the peer-to-peer network functions holds the real power and control. The token is completely speculative and offers no real ownership over the protocol itself. And when you have to interact with the network and other blockchain networks using bridges, this is insecure and will get hacked, just like it happens everywhere else. So I don't see any reason I would invest in this. The market cap is tiny, and to me, it's fundamentally worthless.
The two ways to operate in crypto
Unfortunately, in crypto there are two basic ways to operate. One is to make breakthrough technology by assembling the largest research and development team in the world to put together something that truly delivers things useful for the masses, such as running AI models as smart contracts. That's the only way you could really scale out a fully autonomous, tamper-proof AI that can't just be messed with, hacked, and taken down anytime. If you're going to have a general AI smart enough to be called a general intelligence, this is the only way you can really build it so it couldn't just be controlled by humans or hacked and taken over by somebody else, because it would have to pay for its own computation. That's hard to do, which is why only one crypto has done it.
The other way to operate in crypto, which all the ones at the top are doing, is to lie, cheat, and steal: to fraud your metrics, to pay influencers to talk about you, to completely misrepresent what you're doing, and to take advantage of people by, for example, pushing meme coins on your network. Aleph is doing neither of these two things. So its technology is, in my view, fundamentally useless, and it's not even cheating successfully like the other top cryptos are.
Where this leaves Aleph, and where my money is
On the tech angle, I believe DFINITY is so far ahead with Internet Computer Protocol that nothing else is even going to be able to catch up, unless somebody takes $50 billion and tries to make their own version of ICP, which would take a lot of time and be very difficult. The logical thing to do instead would be to suppress the price and try to stack as much for yourself, which appears to be what's happening. Aleph also has roughly half the supply still not even tradable, so there are a bunch of token unlocks waiting to dump on your head.
So Aleph is not successfully cheating, which to me would seem to be the only way they could get some good price action in the short term, but that wouldn't last in the long term anyway. And in my opinion their tech is useless. So this is just a no man's land where I see no reason I would buy this over Internet Computer Protocol. That's where all my money is, because I've researched thousands of altcoins and I see no better technology in crypto. I see no bigger research and development team in crypto. I see nowhere else I can put my website fully on chain, where I can have my open chat, my Discord or Telegram equivalent community, fully on chain. So I compare everything to that. If you want to go deeper on how I think about all of this, you can dig into my Money playlist.
I reviewed Aleph because you all asked about it while I was live on Twitch. None of this is financial advice; it's simply my honest experience and my opinion after years of researching these projects. You're welcome to have a call with me and ask me about your crypto portfolio or anything else.