Aleo’s non-profit Foundation announced that it had joined the Paxos-backed Global Dollar Network (GDN), an ecosystem built around USDG, a fully regulated U.S. dollar stablecoin issued by Paxos and backed by major partners including Anchorage Digital, Kraken, Mastercard, Paxos, Robinhood, Worldpay, and others. The Aleo Foundation plans on using USDG for on-chain treasury management and vendor payments, all while leveraging its native blockchain’s privacy-preservation setup (enabling the processing of stablecoin transactions in a fully encrypted manner). Not only that, as the first L1 to join the GDN, Aleo will incorporate its zero-knowledge (zK) and private smart contract capabilities into the latter’s ecosystem, which already spans established networks like Solana, Ethereum, and even newcomers like Ink. Hailed as a privacy-first blockchain for programmable payments, Aleo ensures that transaction details (such as who paid whom and how much) stay confidential at all times. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) on Aleo allows transactions to be validated by smart contracts without ever exposing sensitive details. In practice, Aleo’s confidential payment apps can verify things like KYC/AML without publishing payer identities or amounts, meaning that businesses can run payrolls or vendor payments on-chain privately, keeping exact salaries or supplier deals hidden from rivals and public view.