On the 15th of February 2022, Gate.io hosted an AMA with Alephium in their English Telegram-group. This is the transcript from that event.
tomrodg / Gateio
(…) Can you tell us who you are and how did you get the idea for Alephium (ALPH)?
Cheng / Alephium
Hi! I’m Cheng Wang, founder of Alephium. I came from China to Switzerland 8 years ago to do my PhD in Computer science at the EPFL.
I did research on consensus algorithms and byzantine fault tolerance, which brought me to Bitcoin. A few years later I started experimenting with Ethereum and DeFi.
Among other things, I built a flash-loan protocol called UniFlash. Diving deeper, I realized existing blockchains are facing big challenges.
I got passionate and started building to solve the most exciting problem in the field : which infrastructure for the next 10 years of Dapps & DeFi ?
tomrodg / Gateio
Got it, thanks Cheng.
And what problems is Alephium (ALPH) solving?
Cheng / Alephium
We’ve started building Alephium in 2018 with idea to deliver a “scalable Bitcoin” with a reliable and powerful DeFi solution :
Bitcoin is secure, decentralized, but it consumes too much energy and it is not easily programmable.
Ethereum is programmable, convenient, but it is hard to use securely. And both are relatively slow.
Alephium solves the famous blockchain trilemma elegantly :
Thanks to Proof of Less Work, it is decentralized and energy efficient.
Thanks to stateful UTXO & sharding, it is programmable, secure & scalable.
More here : https://wiki.alephium.org/Frequently-Asked-Questions.html
tomrodg / Gateio
Interesting!
And what is Alephium ? Why is it different from other competing L1s?
Cheng / Alephium
Alephium is the first live Layer 1 sharded blockchain scaling and improving on Bitcoin core technologies, Proof of Work & UTXO. It delivers a highly performant, secure DeFi & Dapps platform with enhanced energy efficiency.
Alephium delivers a scalable dApp &DeFi platform that is as secure as bitcoin, as programmable as Ethereum while keeping decentralization & trustlessness as core values.
More here : https://medium.com/@alephium/welcome-to-alephium-alph-48dfb72aa458
& here https://hackernoon.com/what-is-sharding-and-utxo-scaling-for-blockchain
tomrodg / Gateio
Great, thanks for sharing!
Can you tell us more about the ALPH token and its tokenomics?
Maud / Alephium
Sure! ALPH is our official ticker, and we’ve been trading happily on Gate.io for more than a month already. As of today, the total circulating supply is around 48M ALPH. Trade here : gate.io/trade/ALPH_USDT
At mainnet launch (last November), 140M ALPH were minted with the Genesis block and allocated to : sales (80M = 8%), community & ecosystem development (30M = 3%) and team & development (30M = 3%). These tokens have verifiable on-chain lock with vesting periods ranging from 2 to 4 years.
The rest of the tokens (86%) will be used for mining rewards and ensure the processing of transactions on the Alephium blockchain over the next 80 years.
Read more on our tokenomics here: https://medium.com/@alephium/tokenomics-of-alephium-61d59b51029c
tomrodg / Gateio
Got it thanks, and Gate is glad to have had you for this month as well!
Can you talk to us about your roadmap? What things do you think will have a positive impact on the token in 2022?
Vlad / Alephium
Our team of 14 is busy grinding and building everyday, we are now focused on the following:
Full node 🏭 enters the maturity phase, we are working on more optimizations and features, as well as improvements in UX for dApps devs.
Bridges 🌉 are a key component of the project’s ecosystem as they will provide interoperability between Alephium and other blockchains.
dApps 🧰 We are focusing on tooling for dApps use cases like 💸 DeFi and are building a 🐒 NFT platform proof of concept! Get ready to mint!
Wallet 💌 Our wallet will see a lot of improvements, including browser extension & hook for dApps.
Mining Pools ⛏ We love mining pools, and they love us back ! We keep improving the mining experience of pools, large and small and will keep doing so with the help of our amazing mining community! More than 8 awesome mining pools have sprung up already!
Explorer 🔭 Better readability, more metrics & a lot more improvements per request of the community!
Listings ⚖️ After our first listing (welcome gate.io !), we keep pushing for more listings! Stay tuned!
Strategic partnerships 🤝 We will keep looking for new partners for the Alephium family, they help us grow, they challenge us, they open doors for us!
Marketing & awareness 🗣 We keep pushing for qualified awareness, organic growth and community development.
Read more about it here: https://medium.com/@alephium/alephium-q1-project-update-50f4a7b354b0
tomrodg / Gateio
Yes, definitely sounds like the team has a lot on their hands for the upcoming time.
Maybe even some of the community can help contribute. How can we contribute to the project if we wish to do so?
Vladimir / Alephium
🛠 If you’re a dev, start here :
Here’s our latest code update : https://github.com/alephium/alephium/releases/latest/
Come commit and pull request with us : https://github.com/alephium
Wiki : https://github.com/alephium/wiki⛏If you’re a miner, start here !
Start by joining the dedicated Mining channel on discord : https://discord.gg/53QSMpKZyR
Find our Miner starter pack on Github : https://github.com/alephium/alephium-miner-getting-started
The list of all mining pools is updated here: https://wiki.alephium.org/Pool-Mining-Guide.html#community-pools
Tom Rodriguez / Gate.io
Sounds good, everyone please check out the information if you would like to contribute!
At this point we would like to hear questions from the community.
What else would you like to ask the Alephium team?
Questions
Q: Sinan Demirci
What would you say to the devs who advise against dealing with sharded chains?
A: Cheng / Alephium
Sharding is the most promising layer1 one scaling solution, same as sharding for database scaling. However, sharding is very challenging, and so far no project has done it right. We are the first sharded blockchain with nice user experience. For the long term, I believe sharding and layer 2 will be the best combo. For more reasoning, you could check this article by Vitalik: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/04/07/sharding.html
Q: starcrypto fi
What are the steps to become a part of your community, and start getting revenues? Where do we buy, where do we sign up? This looks like an amazing project!
A: 徒 setto セット / Alephium
If you want to Talk with us, join us here :
Discord : https://discord.gg/JErgRBfRSB
Telegram : https://t.me/alephiumgroup
Twitter : https://twitter.com/alephiumIf you want to read, setup, explore and contribute, head there :
Website : https://alephium.org/
Medium : https://medium.com/@alephium
Github: https://github.com/alephiumFor revenues, we started a community reward program in December 2021 you can read more about it here: https://medium.com/@alephium/introducing-community-rewards-f4638bbf14bf We are also looking into giving grants to interesting dApps projects. Of course, mining will also bring you reward.
Q: PomPayPi
Many new projects are risky and subject to smart contracts bugs and vulnerability . Can you assure us What steps has been taken for safety of your platform and have you done any Audit?
A: Vlad / Alephium
As Alephium is a layer 1 blockchain and not a contract on ETH or BSC, there is no standard audit practices. Our code is public and everyone is free to review and contribute to it. Our cryptographic primitives are audited by JPA, one of the authors of the Blake3 hashing algorithm.
Q: EzioAuditore
Staking programme is very important for any project, Can i stake your token? Do you have any plan of starting staking programme?
A: Vlad / Alephium
We are not a Proof of Stake chain, so there is no native staking. Later on, when there will be more DeFi dApps, they might offer staking! In addition, Gate.io offers HODL & EARN as well as Liquidity pool for ALPH.
Q: Svenhash
What does the blockflow technology tries to solve? And how it is integrated in Alephium?
A: Cheng / Alephium
The blockflow algorithm was proposed to improving transaction throughput while keeping the chain as lightweight and decentralized following the same philosophy and design of Bitcoin. The blockflow algorithm is the core algorithm part of Alephium, which has been running on chain stably for 3+ months already. It’s live, ont just white paper concepts
Q: Sinan Demirci
Do you expect it to be difficult for dApp developers to deploy existing dApps from Ethereum to Alephium?
A: Maud / Alephium
Based on our experience, it should be really easy to port dApps from Ethereum to Alephium. Especially once we have provided better documentation, tooling, and UX. Because our smart contract language and VM design solve many of the security issues currently encountered by Dapps, you will not need as many security audits for contracts. And if you take for instance Ethereum the solidity language is easy to learn but quite insecure due to its VM design. In contrast, it is much easier to write secure applications on Alephium. Overall Alephium offers a great balance between easy-to-write and secure applications.
Q: starcrypto fi
What is the most lethal feature and competitive advantage that distinguishes the Alephium project from other projects? Does your project support the staking program? If yes, could you explain the reason?
A: Vlad / Alephium
1 — We are securely sharded! This is insanely difficult to achieve.
2 — We have atomic composability : We are very resistant to MEV.
3 — Tokens run natively on the mainchain
4 — We make DeFi on UTXO !
5 — We have energy-efficient Proof of (Less) Work… and this is just the beginning…
Q: PomPayPi
Well from what i read on today ama, Alephium really a great project, may i know how are the way if i want to purchase Alephium token? Any info regarding presale or public sale your token?
A: Vlad / Alephium
Find it on Gate.io!
Q: Zach Sams
Currently, NFT is very hot, do you think you will apply NFT technology to your products in the future?
A: Vlad / Alephium
We are working on better support for NFTs on Alephium, including an NFT platform in the coming months. Get ready to mint!
Q: ᗩɖᎥossƁαɓყ
what makes your feel confident about the survival of your project in the near future? do you take into account community feedback and demands while developing features of your project?
A: Vlad / Alephium
The technical fundamentals are strong, our technical roadmap is ambitious and our community grows and creates everyday!
We see our miners, mining pools and mining community increasing & improving every day. We see the need for our chain in this new multichain world. We see the need for DeFi on UTXO, we see the need for scaling, and we are the best positioned on those. So yes, we are confident, and hard at work!
Not only do we take into account community feedback, we actively solicit it, and act on it! Every day! We have a community rewards program to reward feedback, help and good ideas. See it here : https://medium.com/@alephium/introducing-community-rewards-f4638bbf14bf
Q: Ok Good
What are the ways for your project to generate revenue in the long run? What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships?
A: Vlad / Alephium
We are partners with the UTXO Alliance and the BAS of Switzerland. Many more are coming, but we are rolling them out slowly.
Q: Stay Real
Many projects look great only on their whitepaper & Roadmap but facing a lot of difficulties when trying to implement the project mission and end with failed. How does your project overcome every obstacle in its project development?
A: Maud / Alephium
Our mainnet is already live and we’ve successfully implemented the innovations described in our whitepapers. https://github.com/alephium/white-paper/
Q: Zeliha Gün
Do you think 10,000 transactions per second is still attractive compared to for example Solana’s 70,000 transactions per second?
A: polto / Alephium
It’s about trade-offs, Solana present itself as semi-decentralized infrastructure. We aim for a decentralized, permission-less, open and censorship resistant infrastructure. In this sense 10K TPS is a lot.
Q: Sinan Demirci
Do you expect it to be difficult for dApp developers to deploy existing dApps from Ethereum to Alephium?
A: Cheng / Alephium
We focusing on dev experience and user experience from day 1 when building Alephium, and smart contract language is similar to Rust which is popular in crypto space. It would be easy for devs to develop on Alephium.
In addition, our virtual machine solve or mitigate a lot of security concerns on EVM, like reentrancy, unlimited authority, etc. This will lower the auditing requirement for dApps, which is great for onboarding developers
Q: Svenhash
What are the bridges to be implemented in a near future?
A: Maud / Alephium
We’re currently working on a wormhole based bridge. We’re also looking into partnering with existing bridge projects.
Q: Stella Heard
IF THE BEAR MARKET COMES will your token PROBABLY DUMP? Do you have any plan to prepared for this bear market? How will you handle the panic sell ?
A: Maud / Alephium
We will focus on consistently delivering. The project is sufficiently funded to sustain bear market.
Q: shuixian13
Many projects have problems with UI / UX and this one turns off new users. How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and with users outside the crypto space?
A: Maud / Alephium
Accessibility is one of our core preocupation. We spent a lot of time designing our desktop wallet and have received great feedback from our community. When our mainnet was launched, we had a 3rd party cloud mining service to allow less experienced users to take part to the network decentralization & security.
Q: Zeliha Gün
How does Alephium protect against attack of 51%?
A: polto / Alephium
In addition to the >50% hashrate we also have checkpoints (as in Ravencoin) to provide economic finality.
Q: Isiah Nana
On your website you don’t mention that you have done any internal or external audit of your smart contract, so can you give us details if you have done any audit before? And in case you haven’t, would you plan to perform any review of your smart contract in the near future?
A: 徒 setto セット / Alephium
As Alephium is a layer 1 blockchain and not a contract on ETH or BSC, there is no standard audit practices. Our code is public and everyone is free to review and contribute to it. Our cryptographic primitives are audited by JPA, one of the authors of the Blake3 hashing algorithm.
Q: Alice Peterson
Do you have any ongoing or upcoming reward program events, please let us know in detail &do you have any ambassador program as well as your project? More communities hold events to attract more people. That is also the main thing to attract project investors
A: Maud / Alephium
https://medium.com/@alephium/introducing-community-rewards-f4638bbf14bf
Q: Luffy Boy
How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not spoken well? Do you have local communities for them to let them better understand about your project?
A: 徒 setto セット / Alephium
Our team is working hard on marketing. We are doing very deliberate, targeted marketing to get a qualitative, active and contributing community! For now we are working on bringing more of a technical crowd to build dApps on Alephium, which will increase utility for everyone and support price. For that we are going to participate in conferences, publish articles, do interviews, contribute to online medias, etc… Marketing is a long term game where timing & targeting are key!
We have at least 6 NON-OFFICIAL local communities already :
RU 🇷🇺 https://t.me/alephiumgroup_ru
TR 🇹🇷 https://t.me/alephium_tr
VN 🇻🇳 https://t.me/alephiumvn
NL 🇳🇱 https://t.me/AlephiumgroupNL
PT 🇧🇷🇵🇹 https://t.me/Alephium_pt
SP 🇪🇸 https://t.me/minerosAlephiumIf you want to create one for your country, let us know!
Q: Ok Good
Could you give me 3 Alephium features to convince me and other investors should invest in Alephium?
A: 徒 setto セット / Alephium
Stateful UTXO, PoLW, Live fully-secure sharded chain.. Alephium is the only one doing this at this point in time :)
Q: Sinan Demirci
Which area are you focusing on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake,Dapps,Nft, Metaverse,Web 3.0..) and what is your goals in this year ?
A: Maud / Alephium
We’re doing a lot of work on bridges, dex, DeFi building blocks. But we are also exploring NFTs, improving mining, wallet and explorer and doing a lot of other backend things!
Documentation and basic infrastructure for building DeFi, NFT, DApps.
Q: Zach Sams
Can you please tell the story behind naming of your project? How did you decide for this name? Where did you get the inspiration? How will this name effect the people in your opinion?
A: Maud
For those of you less familiar with set theory and mathematics the origin of the name “Alephium” might not be so evident. It is made from the name “Aleph” which is defined on wikipedia: “Aleph numbers are a sequence of numbers used to represent the cardinality of infinite sets that can be well-ordered. They were introduced by the mathematician Georg Cantor and are named after the symbol he used to denote them, the Hebrew letter aleph ( ℵ )”
In fact, the logotype for Alephium is a stylisation of the letter Aleph.
Q: John Lexx
Regarding about the current market situation is too unstable, holding back investors.. So can you give me some good reasons why I should buy your tokens in this market situation? And also why should your token holder keep holding?
A: polto / Alephium
I guess the best reason is that you believe in the project 🚀
Q: Cô Bé Quàng Khăn Đỏ
Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not can u tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?
A: polto / Alephium
First of all we delivered the mainnet with all the functionality we promised in our WP. Also, please see the activity and the code quality on our github : https://github.com/alephium/ , please feel free to contribute.
Informations
Tom Rodriguez / Gateio
Alright, thank you very much Alephium team
Tom Rodriguez — [Check Gate.io telegram group admins], [2/15/22 2:44 PM]
Now, I know that you have shared this information already but since we are reaching the end of the AMA, it would be good to do it one more time.
Where can the community keep up to date with the latest news and announcements about the project
Vlad / Alephium
If you want to Talk with us, join us here :
Discord : https://discord.gg/JErgRBfRSB
Telegram : https://t.me/alephiumgroup
Twitter : https://twitter.com/alephiumIf you want to read, setup, explore and contribute, head there :
Website : https://alephium.org/
Medium : https://medium.com/@alephium
Github: https://github.com/alephiumHere, of course, you can interact with ALPH :
Wallet: https://github.com/alephium/alephium-wallet/releases/latest
Explorer: https://github.com/alephium/explorer
Exchange: Gate.io : https://www.gate.io/fr/trade/ALPH_USDT
