Alephium is an UTXO and PoW based scalable Layer 1 blockchain.

It scales through sharding. Alephium is built on a novel and complete sharding algorithm called BlockFlow. It improves on the UTXO model of BTC to make it scalable, and uses DAG data structure to reach consensus between different shards. This will allow up to 10’000 Transactions Per Second (currently more than 400 TPS vs Bitcoins 7 TPS).

It is programmable & secure. Alephium proposes a stateful UTXO model offering layer-1 scalability and the same level of programmability as the account model implemented on ETH, whilst being more secure.

It is less energy consuming thanks to POLW. Proof of Less Work combines physical work and Coin economics to dynamically adjust the work required to mine new blocks. Given the same network conditions, Alephium only uses ⅛ of the energy compared to Bitcoin.

It improves on chain structure with its own custom VM (Alphred). It resolves many of the critical issues of the current dApps platforms with huge improvements on security, development experience and introductions of new paradigms such as trustless P2P smart contracts transactions.

It has its own programming language for dApps. Ralph is similar to the Rust syntax, hence its name. It allows to build efficient and secure smart contracts easier than Solidity for example. It is specifically designed to facilitate the creation of Decentralized Finance applications!

Putting all these innovations together, Alephium delivers a highly demanded solution in the industry: a scalable blockchain improving on mature ideas from Bitcoin to deliver reliable, powerful and secure DeFi and dApps capabilities. And we’re live!

If you are interested in Alephium, ping Polto (4123) from the Swiss Cryptoeconomics assembly.