Aleph.im

Aleph Cloud, known until April 2025 as aleph.im, is a decentralized cloud network that sells storage, virtual machines, serverless functions and GPU compute from independently operated nodes, with Solana among the chains its users can authenticate and pay from. It started out as one of the first decentralized data indexers for Solana DeFi and has since repositioned as a general cloud alternative to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, with a growing focus on confidential computing for AI agents.

What it does

The project's pitch is that most blockchain applications still run their off-chain back ends on centralized cloud providers, which reintroduces a single point of control. Founder and CEO Jonathan Schemoul put it this way when the company rebranded in April 2025: "Most blockchain apps still rely on centralized cloud services, which puts decentralization at risk." Aleph Cloud aims to replace that middleware layer with services run across a peer-to-peer network.

According to the official site, current products include:

• Block storage from 1 MB up to 20 TB, with IPFS integration and encryption options
• VPS instances of up to 12 cores and 2 to 24 GB of RAM, priced from $0.0143 per hour
• GPU cloud instances with up to 12 vCPUs and 18 to 72 GB of RAM, from $0.055 per hour
• Serverless functions and persistent virtual machines
• Confidential VMs running in trusted execution environments

The company claims its pricing is up to 69% cheaper than AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Scaleway, and that its decentralized GPU capacity is up to 80% cheaper than centralized competitors. These are the project's own figures. Users can pay in stablecoins or in ALEPH, with the site advertising a 20% bonus for paying in the native token.

How it works

The developer documentation describes a two-tier node network. Core Channel Nodes (CCNs) form the backbone: they process and distribute messages, maintain consensus and coordinate the network. Compute Resource Nodes (CRNs) do the work, running virtual machines, containers and storage, including AMD SEV confidential computing and GPU acceleration according to the node documentation. OAK Research reports that running a CCN requires a stake of 200,000 ALEPH, while CRNs need no stake but must be linked to a CCN, with staking rewards paid roughly every ten days.

Everything on the network is expressed as signed messages. The docs list POST and AGGREGATE (data and key-value records), STORE (files), PROGRAM (serverless functions), INSTANCE (persistent VMs) and FORGET (deletion). Users sign these with an existing blockchain wallet, so there is no separate account system, and the docs name Ethereum, Solana and Polkadot among supported ecosystems. The homepage lists 12 chains in total, including Solana, Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and Avalanche. TypeScript and Python SDKs and a CLI are available.

Payment has moved through several models. Early on, users reserved resources by holding ALEPH in their wallet. In January 2024 the team launched Twentysix Cloud, a marketplace with pay-as-you-go billing in ALEPH or stablecoins that removed the need to hold or stake tokens. The current documentation lists credits, holding and pay-as-you-go streaming as payment options.

Confidential computing and aleph-vm 2.0

Most of the project's recent engineering has gone into aleph-vm, the software compute nodes run. The team announced aleph-vm 2.0 on X in late August 2026, and the GitHub release notes describe what it added: AMD SEV-SNP confidential instances with measured boot and remote attestation, a feature called V-PROGRAM that lets an entire application stack be measured so users can verify what the machine ran, Docker Compose workloads, and a supervisor rewritten in Rust. Version 2.0.1 added verified read-only data volumes using dm-verity, aimed at files such as model weights. Version 2.1, released in mid-September 2026, added experimental NVIDIA GPU support for confidential instances and groundwork for Intel TDX, which the team says is not yet running in production.

The team pitches confidential VMs mainly at AI agents that hold API keys and credentials in memory, where a conventional host operator could read them.

Solana history

Aleph's Solana ties go back to its early years. In October 2022 it released an open-source, decentralized indexing solution for Solana, saying it indexed Serum markets, Raydium, Port Finance, Saber and Orca across more than 3,000 market pairs and handled over 14 million requests a day on 220+ resource nodes. The Aleph Indexer Framework that came out of that work is a TypeScript toolkit for deploying distributed indexers on Aleph VMs for Solana and EVM chains, with a generator that handles parsing of Solana program instructions and accounts.

ALEPH exists on Solana as a Wormhole-bridged token, [[TOKEN:3UCMiSnkcnkPE1pgQ5ggPCBv6dXgVUy16TmMUe1WpG9x]]. When the 2025 accelerator launched, Aleph said nearly 90% of applications came from Solana projects.

Token

ALEPH pays for network services, serves as staking collateral for Core Channel Nodes and rewards node operators. It launched in late 2020 alongside the network. OAK Research reports a maximum supply of 500 million, reduced from an original 1 billion cap, and describes the token as available on multiple chains including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and BNB Chain.

Team, funding and adoption

Aleph was started in 2019 by Jonathan Schemoul, a French developer; OAK Research names Claudio Pascariello as co-founder. In January 2022 the company raised $10 million in a round led by Stratos Technologies, with Zee Prime Capital, NOIA Capital and others participating. CoinDesk reported users at the time including Ubisoft, which stored NFT metadata for its Quartz platform on Aleph, as well as Polygon, Request Network and Neon Labs.

Network size has grown over time. Decrypt reported 80+ core channel nodes and 250+ compute nodes at the Twentysix launch in January 2024. At the April 2025 rebrand, the company cited more than 700 nodes across 12 countries and support for over 24 blockchains, and it launched a $1 million accelerator that gives startups infrastructure credits through non-transferable soulbound tokens.

The official account names Ubisoft (on-chain randomness and dynamic NFT metadata), LibertAI (private inference on open-weight models), HyperSwap and Franklin as current users. LibertAI's Liberclaw agent service also runs on Aleph Cloud. The team publishes development updates regularly on X and GitHub.