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Overview

Tokens are first class citizens in Alephium. Just like the native token ALPH, all tokens on Alephium are managed by UTXOs, which are owned directly by addresses.

This design has a few advantages compared to other blockchains:

  • Token transfers among users only require UTXOs, which is battle tested for its security in managing assets.
  • Easier for wallets and dApps to discover users' tokens, including both fungible and non-fungible tokens.
  • When smart contracts need to transfer tokens, no extra approval transactions are required since the approval is implicit in the UTXO model. Alephium leverages its unique Asset Permission System to ensure that tokens are handled securely by the smart contracts.
  • Token transfer is very scalable because they can take full advantage of Alephium's Sharding design.

To make it easier to work with tokens in the Alephium ecosystem:

  • Token standards are introduced in the SDK to define standard interfaces for both fungible and non-fungible tokens
  • Utilities functions are defined in the SDK to ease common tasks for dApps and wallets when interacting with the tokens, such as guessing token types and the extraction of token metadata.
  • Token list is used establish a source of trust for well known fungible tokens and NFT collections.
  • Native support for both fungible and non-fungible tokens in wallets and explorer.
  • Tools to help launch Opensea Drop style NFT public sale, called Flow.

In the Fungible Tokens page, you will learn about the fungible token standard, how to issue fungible tokens, how to fetch token metadata and how to transfer fungible tokens in wallets, etc.

In the Non-fungible Tokens page, you will learn about the non-fungible token standard, how to create your own NFT collections and launch your first NFT public sale campaign called Flows in the NFT marketplace.