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.
• 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.
• 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.