Alephium (https://alephium.org) has been around for a while but slightly under the radar to focus more on the research and the technical aspects than raising awareness. However the testnet launched earlier this year and the mainnet launch is approaching, shortly after closing $3.6M Pre-sale From 80 Contributors. So it's time to let people know about the project.
I am new on the forum so I hope I didn't misunderstand any rules. I am involved in Alephium and my part in the project is more on the human side than the technological, but i will do my best to answer any questions you may have.About Alephium
Alephium is the first operational sharded blockchain bringing scalability, ETH-inspired smart contracts, and energy efficiency to Bitcoin's proven core technologies while ensuring better performance.
From its technical design to its interfaces, Alephium has been created with usability and accessibility in mind. It’s made to support powerful, scalable yet user-friendly decentralized applications and protocols.
Blockflow: sharding on BTC’s proven foundations
Alephium is built on the BlockFlow algorithm which delivers efficient and practical UTXO sharding. Inspired by distributed computing models, it combines DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) and sharding. Much more lightweight than other sharding methods, BlockFlow also natively supports single-step cross shard transaction making Alephium user-experience just as convenient as any single chain platform. [White paper]
Proof of Less Work (PoLW)
PoLW uses a clever combination of physical work and token economics to dynamically adjust the work required to mine new blocks, ensuring a reduced energy footprint compared to classic Nakamoto PoW mining. [White paper]
Smart contract design
Alephium’s smart contracts have been designed and implemented to be scalable, functional, practical with a focus on security and reduced state usage. Its stateful UTXO model combines the advantages of both UTXO model and account model.
Novel VM design
Alephium’s novel virtual machine is designed to resolve many of the critical issues of the current dApps platforms. Alephium’s VM is less IO intensive ensuring unmatched performance. Flash loan is not available by design and the VM eliminates many attack vectors of EVM, including unlimited authorization, double dip issue, reentrancy attack, etc. Finally, its UTXO style fine-grained execution model reduces risk-free arbitrage.
Some numbers
We’re passionate and committed to outstanding quality in everything we do. We took the necessary time to transform theory to actual technologies.
- 16 shards
- 100MB of RAM needed by the full node. (Runs on a Raspberry-Pi.)
- Over 3 years of R&D.