Alephium
This repository is the reference implementation of Alephium platform, which is a sharded blockchain to make programmable money scalable and secure.
Main Innovations
The protocol's innovations extend battle-tested ideas from Bitcoin and Ethereum:
- BlockFlow algorithm based on UTXO model enables sharding and scalability for today (code + algorithm paper)
- the first sharding algorithm supports
single-step cross-shard transactions
, same user experience as single chain - the
PoW based sharding
does not rely on beacon chain, simple and elegant
- the first sharding algorithm supports
Stateful UTXO model
combines the advantages of both eUTXO model and account model (see code, wiki to come)- tokens are first-class citizens and UTXO-based, which are safely
owned by users
directly instead of contracts - the same
expressiveness as account model
. DApps can be easily built on top of it with better security - support
multiple participants
in a single smart contract tx call. Multiple calls can be packed into a single tx too
- tokens are first-class citizens and UTXO-based, which are safely
- Novel VM design resolves many critical challenges of dApp platforms (see code, wiki to come)
- it's way
less IO intensive
flash loan is not available
by design- eliminate many
attack vectors of EVM
including unlimited authorization, double dip issue, reentrancy attack, etc - Utxo style
fine-grained execution model
makes risk-free arbitrage less common
- it's way
Front-running mitigation
through random execution of transactions (see code, wiki to come)- PoLW algorithm
reduces the energy consumption
of PoW in the long term (research paper)- Adaptive rewards based on hashrate and timestamp are designed and implemented
- Internal mining cost through burning will be added when hashrate and energy consumption is significantly high
Development Status
This project is currently under heavy development with more code consolidation, optimizations, and tests. You can already try our testnet following this guide wiki/Testnet-Guide.
Installation
Requierments
You must have the following dependencies installed on your system in order to run our JAR delivrable:
- java (>= 8, 11 is recommended)
Running
You can obtain our latest single JAR distribution from the GitHub releases and start the application using the following command:
java -jar alephium-<VERSION>.jar
Build from source
Requierments
In order to build the project from source the following dependencies must be installed on your system:
- java (>= 8, 11 is recommended)
- Python (Python3 is recommended)
- SBT
Single JAR
In order to build a single runnable JAR use the following command:
./make assembly
The resulting assembly file will appear in /app/target/scala-2.13/
directory.
Univeral Zip distribution
In order to build a zip distribution including launch scripts use the following command:
./make package
The resulting package file will appear in the app/target/scala-2.13/universal
directory.
Configuration
You can define user specific settings in the file $ALEPHIUM_HOME/user.conf
, where by default $ALEPHIUM_HOME points to ~/.alephium
.
Testing
There are two kinds of tests:
- Unit and property tests, which can be run with the
./make test
command. - Integration tests, which can be run with the
./make itest
command.