Alephium

5 months ago

Alephium is one of the projects that peaked my interest lately and wanted to make research about it and decide if i want to invest or not.

What is Alephium?

Founded by Cheng Wang in 2019, Alephium is a layer-1 blockchain that combines the benefits of sharding with the robustness of Bitcoin's technology. It uses a unique consensus mechanism called BlockFlow, which supports single-step cross-shard transactions, simplifying the user and developer experience significantly. This approach allows the blockchain to scale efficiently while maintaining high security and decentralization.

How Alephium Works

BlockFlow Sharding: This algorithm divides the blockchain state into multiple shards, allowing transactions to be processed in parallel. This significantly boosts throughput, with current capabilities around 400 transactions per second (TPS), aiming for over 10,000 TPS as the network matures. This is a substantial improvement over Bitcoin's 7 TPS.
Proof of Less Work (PoLW): To address the high energy consumption associated with Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains like Bitcoin, Alephium introduces PoLW. This mechanism reduces the energy required for mining by dynamically adjusting the work needed based on network conditions. This makes Alephium about eight times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin.
Alphred and Ralph: Alephium's virtual machine (Alphred) and its dedicated programming language (Ralph) offer enhanced security and ease of use. Ralph is designed to be simple yet powerful, drawing inspiration from Rust. This setup helps developers create secure and efficient smart contracts, particularly suited for DeFi applications .

What Alephium is Trying to Solve

Scalability: Alephium's BlockFlow sharding addresses this by allowing parallel transaction processing.
Energy Efficiency: By implementing PoLW, Alephium significantly reduces the energy consumption of its blockchain operations, making it more sustainable.
Developer Experience: The combination of Alphred and Ralph simplifies the development of decentralized applications (dApps) and enhances security.

Competitive Edge

Single-Step Cross-Shard Transactions: Unlike many sharded blockchains that require complex mechanisms for cross-shard transactions, Alephium's BlockFlow allows these to happen in a single step, simplifying the process for users and developers.
Energy Efficiency: Alephium's PoLW makes it more environmentally friendly compared to traditional PoW blockchains, which is a significant advantage as concerns about blockchain energy consumption grow .
Developer Tools: The Alphred VM and Ralph language offer powerful, secure, and user-friendly tools for developers, setting Alephium apart as a developer-centric platform.

Tokenomics

Alephium's token, ALPH, has a maximum supply of 1 billion tokens. At the mainnet launch in November 2021, 140 million tokens were mined with the genesis block.

80 million tokens (8%): Pre-sales and future strategic private sales with vesting periods of 2 to 4 years.
30 million tokens (3%): Community and ecosystem development, locked on-chain for 4 years, vesting quarterly.
30 million tokens (3%): Treasury & team, locked on-chain for 3 years, vesting quarterly.
860 million tokens (86%): Mining rewards over approximately 80 years (Alephium Docs).

The circulating supply can be tracked through Alephium's explorer, which follows the Coin Market Cap methodology.

Ecosystem
Alephium has a growing ecosystem supported by a range of wallets (desktop, mobile, browser extension), a bridge to Ethereum, and various decentralized applications (dApps) like Ayin (DEX), Deadrare (NFT marketplace), and ALPH.bet (gaming app).

Links

https://alephium.org/
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/alephium
https://twitter.com/alephium