Alephium Wiki
This wiki contains the documentation of Alephium, a sharded blockchain that makes programmable money scalable and secure.
Here, you will find information on how to set up a full node and get started with mining, troubleshooting sections, guides for our wallets, a guide on building smart contracts, the roadmap of our projects, FAQs, and more.
Alephium protocol overview
The protocol's innovations extend battle-tested ideas from Bitcoin and Ethereum:
- BlockFlow algorithm based on UTXO model enables sharding and scalability for today (code + algorithm paper)
- The first sharding algorithm that supports
single-step cross-shard transactions
, offering the same user experience as single chain. - Simple and elegant
PoW based sharding
, does not rely on beacon chain.
- The first sharding algorithm that supports
Stateful UTXO model
combines the advantages of both eUTXO model and account model (see code, wiki to come).- Tokens are first-class citizens and UTXO-based, which are
owned by users
directly instead of contracts. - Offer the same expressiveness as
account model
. DApps can be easily built on top of it with better security. - Support
multiple participants
in a single smart contract transaction. Multiple calls can be packed into a single transaction too.
- Tokens are first-class citizens and UTXO-based, which are
- Novel VM design resolves many critical challenges of dApp platforms (see code, wiki to come).
- Less IO intensive.
- Flash loan is not available by design.
- Eliminate many attack vectors of EVM, including unlimited authorization, double dip issue, reentrancy attack, etc.
- UTXO style
fine-grained execution model
reduces risk-free arbitrage.
Front-running mitigation
through random execution of transactions (see code, wiki to come).- PoLW algorithm reduces the energy consumption of PoW in the long term (research paper).
- Adaptive rewards based on hashrate and timestamp are designed and implemented.
- Internal mining cost through burning will be added when hashrate and energy consumption is significantly high.