Written by: Ningning
When mentioning PoW coins today, the new generation of newbies will feel a very strong sense of unfamiliarity, knowing little about these relics of the Cambrian era of crypto assets, let alone having any concrete understanding of concepts like combating ASIC consensus algorithms and Master Nodes, which were once popular.
The high-speed rail of the times is rushing forward. After Ethereum transitioned to the PoS consensus algorithm, PoS chains have become the default setting for Web3 Infra. However, there remains a portion of resolute crypto fundamentalists who believe that the only application of crypto should be Coin/Currency, rather than the myriad of other utilities.
In their view, only coins/currencies produced through the PoW consensus mechanism possess the natural aura of 'non-state currency', which cannot be compared to the interest generated by PoS consensus emissions that are tainted by financial capitalism.
Under the support of this niche but strong consensus, PoW coins will occasionally yield super Alphas with a hundredfold or thousandfold increase in value.
Previously, there was Beam in 2019, followed by Kaspa in 2023. The year 2024 seems relatively quiet.
Among the new generation of PoW coins on the market, Alephium is the one with the most super Alpha characteristics.
Personally, I believe that the four necessary conditions for a PoW coin to become a super Alpha are:
The grand narrative of Make Sense
Full support from the mining conspiracy group
Self-consistent consensus mechanism and token economics
Stable token output and sufficient liquidity
Let's use this standard to measure Alephium's fundamentals:
-- In terms of grand narratives, Alephium combines both technical and commercial grand narratives.
Technical grand narrative:
Alephium pioneered the Proof-of-Less-Work (PoLW) consensus mechanism, maintaining PoW security while reducing energy consumption by 87%.
BlockFlow sharding technology achieves scalability, currently supporting 400 TPS and potentially expandable to 10,000 TPS in the future. It features a UTXO-based smart contract system (sUTXO) similar to CKB and Fuel, combining the security of Bitcoin with the programmability of Ethereum.
Unlike other PoW coins, Alephium's programmability is excellent, and it emphasizes incentivizing DAPP developers, having initially built a complete application ecosystem. Recently, the total TVL of the Alephium ecosystem reached an ATH of $24.22M, while the DEX Elexium's stablecoin LP pool USDTeth/USDCeth has an APR of up to 43.79%. This is already an impressive achievement for an ecosystem with a protocol-native token circulating market value of only $150M.
Commercial grand narrative:
Alephium's PoLW mechanism naturally aligns with ESG principles, the sUTXO model supports complex asset tokenization logic, and high scalability meets the needs of large-scale RWA on-chain. These characteristics make Alephium naturally suitable as a distributed ledger infrastructure for operating ESG RWA assets.
Recently, Alephium has reached a cooperation with GIGATONS, headquartered in the Abu Dhabi ADGM Financial Free Zone, where GIGATONS chose Alephium as the underlying blockchain for its GIGA Protocol, planning to tokenize 100 billion USD ESG assets on Alephium within 10 years. The first cooperation project is to jointly develop solar-powered Bitcoin mining facilities with HEARST.
This solar-powered Bitcoin mining project generates verifiable on-chain carbon credits by integrating renewable energy with crypto mining, aiming to reduce CO₂ emissions by 4,500 tons annually.
In terms of support from mining conspiracy groups, 'mining giant' Bitmain has quietly entered the Alephium mining space, designing and producing the Ant AL1 ASIC mining machine. Alephium also chose the Blake3 consensus algorithm, which is friendly to ASIC chip design and development. Moreover, Alephium has already received support from leading mining pools like Antpool and f2pool. Taking the Ant AL1 ASIC mining machine as an example, at the current price, setting the electricity price at $0.06 per kilowatt, the daily electricity cost is $5.05, and the daily mining income is $25.52. This level of profit remains quite objective after deducting the depreciation of the mining machine and operational costs, resembling the situation of Kaspa in early 2023.
In terms of consensus mechanisms and token economics, Alephium has made a 'disruptive innovation' to the classic PoW halving economic model, inventing the PoLW consensus mechanism. When the total network computing power exceeds 1 Eh/s, miners need to burn 87.5% of their theoretical earnings to gain mining rights, thus converting most external costs (equipment and electricity) into internal costs (burning $ALPH). In this way, the security and decentralization of PoW are maintained while reducing energy consumption by about 87%, while creating scarcity of $ALPH. In addition, Alephium also has mechanisms such as 100% destruction of transaction fees and locked smart contract storage rent, further empowering $ALPH.
Currently, Alephium's $ALPH has been listed on exchanges such as http://Gate.io and MEXC, and has deployed cross-chain bridges (ETH, BSC). There is also a liquidity pool on Uniswap on the Ethereum mainnet, fully meeting the needs of miners to sell coins for electricity and maintenance fees. In terms of token output, the computing power scale has remained between 20PH/s and 30PH/s in the past two months. In the past year, due to the production of Aisc mining machines and the joining of mining pools, the computing power scale has increased by about 1000 times.
In summary, in investments we should not be rigid or dogmatic, and always think about adding a touch of diversity to our portfolios.
Above.