Alephium, a novel sharded blockchain focused on scalability and smart contract development, has released its mainnet according to an official announcement on November 9. This blockchain ecosystem builds on the fundamentals of Bitcoin’s core architecture, introducing a more energy-efficient network that supports Decentralized Applications (dApps).
The debut of Alephium’s mainnet comes barely two months after the project raised $3.6 million from a pre-sale event. With the mainnet now running, decentralized applications and protocols have an opportunity to leverage Alephium’s network, whose primary focus is solving scalability and security issues in the DeFi space.
Cheng Wang, Alephium’s core developer, commented on the mainnet release and invited community developers to contribute towards the platform’s growth:
"After over 3 years of development under the radar, we are proud to announce the launch of the Alephium Mainnet. It’s made to support powerful, scalable, yet user-friendly decentralized applications and protocols. We welcome the community of developers and miners to join us in improving the ecosystem one project at a time."
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Unlike other sharded blockchain networks, Alephium’s infrastructure follows a practical and straightforward design powered by Blockflow, a sharding algorithm with similar minimal network assumptions to Bitcoin’s blockchain. The Blockflow algorithm leverages a DAG data structure, enabling the Alephium network to resolve shard dependency issues.
As for transaction finality, Alephium complements the Blockflow algorithm with a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus to guarantee its decentralized architecture and a secure dApp building environment. Additionally, the platform features native cross-shard transactions, giving users a similar experience to operating within a single blockchain network.
DeFi applications and protocols can be built on Alephium’s P2P smart contract platform based on the network’s stateful UTXO model. This model combines its advantages with those of the accounting model to allow the grouping of several participants and calls within one smart contract transaction.
Wang concluded:
"Alephium offers a whole new programming paradigm for decentralized applications, ideally suited for performance-oriented and secure DeFi. Leveraging Alephium’s custom virtual machine, dApps can now benefit from the security offered by the stateful UTXO model without sacrificing the power and expressiveness of smart contracts."