Are you worried about losing your crypto assets in smart contract exploits, or tired of constantly signing transactions to approve sending tokens?

Or perhaps you're concerned about Bitcoin's excessive energy usage, or how your decentralized application will perform when it skyrockets in popularity...

If so, you may want to check out the Alephium blockchain, a secure and efficient dapp platform that has been busy tackling these problems for years.

In this article, we will briefly cover Alephium's key innovations, and go over some points related to their latest network upgrade "Denube" that just got pushed to testnet.

Token Security

Alephium has the programmability of Ethereum, combined with the stateful UTXO model of Bitcoin, allowing for smart contracts to be changed without sacrificing asset security.

By separating assets from the contract states, Alephium defends itself from reentrancy attacks, like the one used in the infamous 2016 DAO hack which enabled a hacker to withdraw over $150 million worth of ETH from a smart contract.

Alephium's token model also means that you don't have to constantly approve tokens in your wallet before staking or spending them on the network.

Although Alephium's UTXO model does increase security and make parallel execution easier, developing complex apps can be more challenging, especially for programmers who are used to Ethereum's account model.

Proof of (Less) Work

By implementing a novel consensys algorithm called Proof of Less Work (PoLW), Alephium uses less energy than Bitcoin, without sacrificing security.

Alephium will use Proof of Work until the total hashrate of the network reaches 1 Exahash per second. At that point, the network will switch to PoLW and miners will have to burn a certain amount of the ALPH in order to mine new coins.

Sharding for Scalability

Ethereum was designed to process blocks sequentially, which degrades network performance when dapps get too busy. To distribute the load, Alephium implements a version of sharding called BlockFlow, which allows parallel transaction processing across shards that are interconnected with single-step cross-shard transactions.

Denube Upgrade

Alephium just pushed their latest "Denube" upgrade to testnet, with mainnet implementation on the horizon soon.

Here are some of the key changes Denube makes to the Alephium protocol:

Single Address

Before the Denube upgrade, users had to create a different wallet address for each group of nodes on the network. After Denube, a single address can be used across all groups, simplifying usage for new users.

Chained Transactions

Now several smart contracts can be called and use the assets created during those calls in a single transaction (ex: swap Token A → Token B → Token C in a single action).

Faster Block Times

Block confirmations are now 8 seconds instead of 16 seconds (2 blocks per second across all chains/shards).

Quick Sync

People who spin up new Alephium nodes used to have to wait a day or more to download the entire blockchain. Now nodes will download a "skeleton" of the blockchain, and fetch data in parallel, making the process much faster.

Passkey Support

While seed phrases are the most secure, they can easily be forgotten. After the Denube upgrade, users will be able to log in to their accounts using face ID, touch ID, or hardware keys.

Tail Emissions

After the initial 81 years, $ALPH will continue to be mined at a slow, steady pace to ensure miners remain incentivized long-term.

To see the full list of changes, you can read Alephium's article on X.

Until next time...

Like many other projects, Alephium has suffered price-wise in the bear market - falling from a market cap of $250 million to roughly $35 million. Despite the pitiful market conditions, the team has continued to push forward, and the token has been recovering.

If you're looking for an advanced smart contract platform that offers a combination of security, scalability, and energy-efficiency, be sure to keep an eye on Alephium.

If you learned something new from this article, be sure to check out my other posts on crypto and finance here on the Hive blockchain. You can also follow me on InLeo for more frequent updates.

Further Reading

- Alephium's Surging Hash Rate Signals A Blossoming Ecosystem

Sources

- Inuibong Abasi's Article
- Alephium Docs
- Be In Crypto Article
- Danube Upgrade Details