AO Decoded

Welcome to AO Decoded: a book about AO, the decentralized supercomputer built on top of Arweave. This book takes an approachable look at AO and how it works from an architectural perspective.

AO is quite a unique piece of architecture, and is a powerful piece of technology. Due to its novel approach, it requires some new concepts to be learned which you might not be familiar with. This is true even if you are well-versed in the crypto space.

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone interested in understanding the architecture and purpose of AO.

The goal of this book

The goal of this book is twofold: to help you understand how AO works, and by extension, help you to realize the benefits AO offers resulting from its architecture.

This book is written in a such a way that it introduces the core technologies and familiar concepts before going into more detail about how they work, and how they differ from other decentralized networks/blockchains.

This approach is aimed at making it as easy as possible to get acquainted with AO.

Prerequisites

This book assumes no large prerequisites, but assumes a general understanding of:

• What blockchain technology is
• Some computing-related terminology

Overall, this book should generally be readable by anyone familiar with how blockchains work, and are curious about the unique and particular aspects of AO.

We hope this book helps you understand how AO works, and in turn, helps you to realize the benefits that AO Computer and Arweave can offer as a whole.

What this book is not

AO Decoded is not a guide on how to create or deploy applications on AO, or intended as developer documentation. It is also not intended as an explanation of how to run AO nodes or pieces of infrastructure.

If this is instead what you are interested in, take a look at the different cookbooks respectively.

Contributing

This book is open source, and open to contributions.

If you want to contribute content to this book, fix a typo, work on a translation, or something else entirely, you can find the source code on GitHub here.