Alex Dovzhanyn is the creative tour-de-force spearheading the Elixium Network project. He currently resides in New York City, NY but is a native of Ukraine. At 19, Alex is on a secure path in this new and evolving space; with the knowledge base and business acumen to champion the Elixium Network. I had the opportunity of meeting Alex at a hackathon in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He hosted a blockchain programming with Javascript workshop for the hackathon participants.
Elixium official website is a decentralized application networks built for developers. It's pride is in being an open-source, smart contacting language agnostic and security centric project.
"Elixium takes a unique stance on smart contracting -- Elixium is language agnostic, smart contracts can be written in any language that compiles to WebAssembly, which means developers can use their existing toolset rather than learning a new one."
They plan on using zero knowledge proofs (zk-snarks) which allows for much higher fungibility than other coins, which also means they have a high degree of privacy so users can't be tracked on the chain.
Alex is also really excited about Elixium's smooth emission algorithm that allows tokens to be emitted at a much more evenly distributed rate. Nerd info on algorithm here and here
Alex : "It's a good improvement over the way Bitcoin emits tokens, and it doesn't cause massive drops in mining power whenever the block reward lowers because it's always gradually lowering from block to block. It helps maintain a healthy hashing power throughout the network at any given moment."
C-M: Since Elixium isn't a forked project, can you name some advantages you have starting from scratch?
Alex: We’re able to implement things without worrying about backwards compatibility. It allows us to implement more quickly. We have the benefit of using a higher level language than Ethereum (ETH), so developer time is quicker and it should be easier for new developers to join the team. Since ETH is written in C/C++, it’s considered one of the harder languages to learn.
C-M: I‘ve heard that with solidity that floating point math isn’t possible (hackernoon article on floating point in solidity) which is why I'm hesitant to learn Solidity. It took one of my friends who is really talented at math, about 8 hours researching how to get around floating point. What’s your thoughts on this?
Alex: I haven’t really played around too much with solidity, but I know if I didn’t have floats in a programming language I wouldn’t use it – it’s really inconvenient to do and I’d probably end up implementing my own float library. Floating point math is really hard to get around, even in a trivial application like a finance tracker.
Floating point math is difficult when you don’t have access to floats cause then what you have to do is basically find a way around it. instead of being able to use a number like 0.5 you’d have to find a way to (internally) represent it. Which I’d end up doing in binary or something like 0x00005 where the first 4 digits are integers and the last digit is the decimal but then that math gets super annoying. Imagine having to add 0xAD1F3 + 0x00005. Not an easy conversion visually.
How to get involved
This is a community based project, so jump into the Elixium ecosystem! Keep up to date on Alex Dovzhanyn and Elixium Network with the resources below.
Elixium Network is looking for developers to contribute and join their channels. It's a great way to be apart of the future of the internet.
Network: WIP Testnet Block Explorer, Deploying an Elixium Full Node, Elixium Non-Miner Full Node
Official Website: Elixium Network,
Socials: Telegram Group, Telegram Developer Group, Github, Reddit, Twitter