In this tutorial, you will learn how to host a Alephium full-node on Flux infrastructure. Running your own node is the best path to disintermediation, trustless independent verification, privacy, and economic self-sovereignty.
Doing so on a truly decentralized infrastructure like Flux guarantees you great resilience against system failures and external censorship attempts.
But before we start this tutorial, let’s learn a bit more about Alephium and Flux.
Alephium— A New Paradigm
Alephium is the first operational sharded L1 blockchain scaling and enhancing PoW & UTXO concepts. Decentralization, self-sovereignty and security meet high-performance, accessibility and energy efficiency in a dev-friendly network optimized for DeFi & smart contract applications.
- Like Bitcoin, but more programmable & energy efficient.
- Like Ethereum, but more secure & scalable.
- Like Solana, but more decentralised & trustless.
Alephium is distinguished by the following technical specificities:
It scales through sharding. Alephium is built on a novel and complete sharding algorithm called BlockFlow. It improves on the UTXO model of BTC to make it scalable, and uses DAG data structure to reach consensus between different shards. This will allow up to 10’000 Transactions Per Second (currently more than 400 TPS vs Bitcoins 7 TPS).
It is programmable & secure. Alephium proposes a stateful UTXO model offering layer-1 scalability and the same level of programmability as the account model implemented on ETH, whilst being more secure.
It is less energy consuming thanks to POLW. Proof of Less Work combines physical work and Coin economics to dynamically adjust the work required to mine new blocks. Given the same network conditions, Alephium only uses ⅛ of the energy compared to Bitcoin.
It improves on chain structure with its own custom VM (Alphred). It resolves many of the critical issues of the current dApps platforms with huge improvements on security, development experience and introductions of new paradigms such as trustless P2P smart contracts transactions.
It has its own programming language for dApps. Ralph is similar to the Rust syntax, hence its name. It allows to build efficient and secure smart contracts easier than Solidity for example. It is specifically designed to facilitate the creation of Decentralized Finance applications!
Putting all these innovations together, Alephium delivers a highly demanded solution in the industry: a scalable blockchain improving on mature ideas from Bitcoin to deliver reliable, powerful and secure DeFi and dApps capabilities.
Flux — The Web3 Cloud
Flux is the next generation computational network, decentralized Web 3.0. Flux provides the critical, high availability infrastructure for the New Internet. Any hardened dockerized application can run on Flux’s fully decentralized computational network.
There are plenty of advantages to using Flux instead of traditional Web2 infrastructure providers:
- All applications are redundant and have automatic failovers in case of outages.
- The Flux Cloud is agnostic to code language as it uses Docker Hub containers as the on-ramp.
- The Flux Cloud automatically keeps applications up to date with the respective container.
- The Flux service offers an alternative to other cloud service providers, while maintaining competitive pricing.
Now that we are more familiar with these two projects, it is time to host our Alephium node on Flux.
The Tutorial
Prerequisites:
- Install Zelcore wallet, the popular wallet designed for Flux
- You need to have FLUX (Flux) tokens, you will find here the list of exchanges offering them.
On many Exchanges you will have either FLUX (ERC20) or FLUX (BEP20), so you will need to send them to your Zelcore wallet, then go to Apps / Fusion to swap them into FLUX (Flux). You will need a few dollars of BNB to pay the gas fees.
Once these prerequisites are done, let’s start the tutorial.
- To perform the first step, please visit https://home.runonflux.io/
- Once on the site, log in using your ZelID. This is an instance of the Zelcore wallet. You can then Sign and Send.
3. Once authentication is done, go to the Flux marketplace and search for the Alephium Node app.
4. Do not specify any other parameters and click on the Start Marketplace application. The next screen will look like this:
5. Click on next and then sign the message manually from your ZelID application, then click Sign and Send
6. The next screen shows the monthly cost of your application. Click on Register Flux App.Once done, you will get the message Registration Hash Received
7. You receive information about the payment in FLUX token. The payment is made via the FLUX blockchain in FLUX token. You can pay with Zelcore
8. You’re done! Now all you have to do is wait for your Alephium node to be created on an available node.
Monitoring your node
Log in with your ZelID, and go to https://home.runonflux.io/apps/globalapps and then to the “My Apps” tab. There you can manage and visit the Alephium node deployments you’ve made so far.
Click on the down arrow to see the specifications of your application and the IPs that run it.
With Flux Cloud, your Alephium node is redundant! This means that it is always running on a minimum of three instances simultaneously. You can check the logs of individual IPs to see that the node is synchronizing properly.
You can visit an IP by clicking on “Visit FluxNode” and logging in with your ZelID.
Navigate to “Apps”, “Local Apps”, “My Local Apps” and Click on “Manage”, “Manage App”, “Log File”.
Important information: Remember that your Alephium node is only subscribed for 22,000 flow blocks, which is about 44,000 minutes, or about one month. You will need to renew the payment each month, so that your node is not kicked off the network.
How I can renew my hosting?
It’s easy, just go back to the site
https://home.runonflux.io/ and log in with your ZelID.
Then navigate to “Apps”, “Global Apps”, “My Apps” and Click on “Manage”, “Manage App”, “Update Specifications”.
Leave all variables as they are, click on “Compute Update Message”. You will then need to sign the message with ZelID and click on “Update Flux App”.
Click on “Pay with Zelcore” to make the payment by FLUX (Flux).
That’s it, your node has been renewed for 22,000 blocks
