Written by: Ningning

Today, when mentioning PoW coins, the new generation of newbies feels a strong sense of unfamiliarity, knowing very little about the remnants of these crypto assets from the Cambrian era, let alone having any concrete understanding of concepts like combating ASIC consensus algorithms or Master Nodes, which were once popular.

The high-speed train of the era rushes forward with a whoosh. After Ethereum transitioned to the PoS consensus algorithm, PoS chains have become the default setting for Web3 Infra. However, there are still some determined crypto fundamentalists who believe that the only application of crypto should be Coin/Currency, rather than the various other Utilities.

In their eyes, only coins/currencies produced through the PoW consensus mechanism possess the natural aroma of 'non-state currency', which cannot be compared to the interest emitted by PoS consensus, tainted by the scent of financial capitalism.

PoW coins, under the support of this niche but strong consensus, will occasionally produce a super Alpha with a hundredfold or thousandfold increase.

With the Beam of 2019 in the front and Kaspa of 2023 in the back, 2024 is relatively quiet.

Among the new generation of PoW coins currently 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 mining conspiracy groups

  • Consistency in consensus mechanisms and token economics

  • Stable token output and sufficient liquidity

We use this standard to measure Alephium's fundamentals:

-- In terms of grand narratives, Alephium combines both technological grand narratives and commercial grand narratives.

Technological grand narrative:

Alephium is the first to create the Proof-of-Less-Work (PoLW) consensus mechanism, reducing energy consumption by 87% while maintaining the security of PoW.

BlockFlow sharding technology achieves scalability, currently supporting 400 TPS and can be expanded to 10,000 TPS in the future. The sUTXO-based smart contract system, similar to CKB and Fuel, combines the security of Bitcoin with the programmability of Ethereum.

Unlike other PoW coins, Alephium's programmability is outstanding and emphasizes incentivizing DApp developers, having initially built a complete application ecosystem. Recently, the total TVL of the Alephium ecosystem has reached an ATH of $24.22M, while the APR of the stablecoin LP pool USDTeth/USDCeth in the DEX Elexium has reached 43.79%. This is an impressive achievement for an ecosystem with a 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 large-scale RWA on-chain demand. These features make Alephium inherently 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 trade zone. GIGATONS has chosen Alephium as the underlying blockchain for its GIGA Protocol, planning to tokenize $100 billion of ESG assets on Alephium over the next ten years. The first cooperative project is jointly developing a solar-powered Bitcoin mining facility with HEARST.

This solar-powered Bitcoin mining project, by combining renewable energy with crypto mining, generates verifiable on-chain carbon credit quotas, 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 sector, designing and producing the Ant AL1 ASIC miner. Alephium has also chosen the Blake3 consensus algorithm, which is friendly to ASIC chip design and development. Moreover, Alephium has received support from leading mining pools such as Antpool and f2pool. For example, with the Ant AL1 ASIC miner, under the current price, setting the electricity cost at $0.06 per kilowatt-hour, the daily electricity cost is $5.05, and the daily mining income is $25.52. This level of profit, after deducting miner depreciation and operational costs, is still quite objective, reminiscent of the good state of Kaspa at the beginning of 2023.

  • In terms of consensus mechanisms and token economics, Alephium has performed 'disruptive innovation' on the classic PoW halving economic model and invented the PoLW consensus mechanism. When the total network hash rate exceeds 1 Eh/s, miners need to burn 87.5% of theoretical earnings to gain mining rights, thereby converting most external costs (equipment and electricity) into internal costs ($ALPH burning). This way, the security and decentralization of PoW are maintained while reducing energy consumption by about 87%, while also creating the scarcity of $ALPH. In addition, Alephium also has mechanisms such as 100% destruction of transaction fees and smart contract storage rent locking, further empowering $ALPH.

  • Currently, Alephium's $ALPH has been listed on exchanges such as http://Gate.io and MEXC, and a cross-chain bridge (ETH, BSC) has been deployed. There is also a liquidity pool on Uniswap on the Ethereum mainnet, fully meeting miners' needs for selling coins to pay for electricity and maintenance. In terms of token output, the hash rate has maintained between 20PH/s and 30PH/s over the past two months. In the past year, due to the production of Aisc miners and the joining of mining pools, the hash rate has grown by about 1,000 times.

In summary, we should be neither rigid nor absolute in investments; we should always think about adding a touch of diversity to our investment portfolio.

Above.