What Is Alephium (ALPH)?                             

Alephium is a partitioned blockchain network that aims to facilitate more transactions per second (TPS). A partitioned or "sharded" Alephium blockchain seeks to improve on the key technology of Bitcoin. Sharding is a database partitioning technique used by blockchain firms to divide their networks into smaller segments called "shards." The technology reduces processing speed by removing latency because each shard holds its data, which is a fraction of the total. Hence, Alephium aims to provide a high-performance, secure DeFi and dApps platform that is also energy efficient.

Experts believe that blockchain technology cannot achieve mass adoption until it addresses the problems of scalability and speed. Alephium intends to address scalability issues through its BlockFlow algorithm by combining sharding and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), which reduces the transaction load of each node significantly. A Directed Acyclic Graph or DAG is a data structuring technique that uses vertices and edges rather than blocks. Simply put, a blockchain system resembles a chain, whereas DAG's system resembles a graph. Alephium uses a unique protocol that seeks to stand out from other sharded blockchains. The essential features are as follows:

• BlockFlow: Alephium is based on the BlockFlow algorithm, which is far lighter than existing sharding approaches. The protocol also supports cross-shard transactions that intend to make the Alephium user interface as seamless as any single chain platform.

• Proof-of-less-work (PoLW) algorithms: PoLW uses a combination of physical effort and token economics. The work required to mine new blocks may be dynamically adjusted, resulting in a lower energy footprint than original BitcoinProof-of-Work mining.

• Smart contractdesign: Alephium's smart contracts were created to be scalable, functional, and practical, focusing on security.

• Novel VM: Alephium employs a virtual machine that is simple, secure, and adaptable to the needs of dApps. 

The native token of Alephium is ALPH. The token maintains the blockchain's decentralization and overall security by incentivizing miners to process blocks on the Alephium blockchain. Mining is the core mechanism of the Alephium blockchain by which transaction records are added and verified across the network. The token also serves to secure the Alephium network against spam attacks via transaction fees payable in the ALPH token. 

History of Alephium (ALPH)

Alephium is the brainchild of Cheng Wang, a data scientist based in Switzerland. The total supply of ALPH tokens is limited to one billion.