Bringing the A-game: 2024 outlook of our Alephium investment

In April 2022, we announced an exciting partnership with Alephium (ALPH), an innovative and scalable Layer 1 blockchain. Since its mainnet launch on 8th November 2021, the chain has achieved key milestones, including releasing a bridge, welcoming its first dApps, such as a decentralized exchange (DEX), and launching a full wallets suite.

Our partnership has helped Alephium build a healthy ecosystem with a thriving community of developers, users, investors and service providers to enable scalable dApps for real-world use cases.

Alephium’s value proposition

Alephium defies industry norms by pioneering transformative technologies. Steering away from the prevalent compromises in the industry, Alephium delivers an entirely novel, secure and scalable landscape for tokens, smart contracts, and decentralized applications (dApps). We are proud to have invested in this leading blockchain and recognise the following factors as key drivers towards this decision:

1. The team has a very multidisciplinary experience, combining experience in finance, technology, open-source software and academia. Founder Cheng Wang has a strong background in both cryptography and distributed computing due to his two PhD research experiences. He proposed the first linear-time asynchronous byzantine agreement algorithm.
2. Scalability: Alephium is built on a novel sharding algorithm called BlockFlow. It leverages a stateful UTXO model and DAG data structure to deliver efficient and practical sharding. This enables Alephium to natively support more than 10,000 transactions per second while preserving a seamless “‘single-chain” user experience.
3. Smart contracts & dApps security: The industry predominantly relies on EVM-compatible or account-based environments, inheriting vulnerabilities that have led to repeated multi-million-dollar hacks. By creating a new VM, specifically designed to take advantage of its sUTXO’s strengths, Alephium eliminates most of these attacks vectors (reentrancy attack, unlimited authorization, double dip issue, flash loan, etc) and pioneers entirely new possibilities for smart contracts, dApps and tokens.
4. Decentralization & energy consumption: Alephium’s Proof of Less Work is a simpler, more consistent and robust consensus mechanism for achieving decentralization while reducing the energy consumption by over 87% compared to the “classic” Proof Of Work. On Alephium, anyone can run a full node and verify on-chain data.
5. Great user experience: Whether in its technological and product designs, Alephium shows a true commitment to user experience and usability. It offers a beautifully crafted suite of wallets for desktop, browser extension and mobile.
6. Adoption: In 2023, Alephium’s ecosystem started to bloom. At the time of this release, the network counts over 150’000 GPUs and its dApps ecosystem sits at more than $30M+ TVL thanks to its bridge and DEX.

For information on areas like tokenomics, milestones and roadmap, you can find the ALPH docs here.

Why developers should build on Alephium

1 — Devs can focus on logic! Alephium’s smart contract language is equipped with numerous checks and built-in controls, to allow devs to focus on what matters. These features act as safeguards, helping them avoid common mistakes and bugs that could compromise the integrity of smart contracts while preserving expressiveness and ease of use for developers.

2 — The language is easy to approach & powerful! It was specifically designed to work with the custom VM of Alephium to increase the security and expressiveness of smart contracts. The Ralph language is explicitly designed to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities, such as reentrancy and integer overflow bugs.

3 — ALPH tech stack is evolving rapidly. The Leman upgrade, last april brought great improvements to developer experience. The prototypes of dApps designed by the team have proved to be useful templates for devs.

4 — Ralph’s SDK is relatively straightforward and has been designed with the creation of effective and secure smart contracts in mind. In turn, this facilitates the development of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications for real-world use cases and/or assets.

5 — The accessibility of core-devs! You can reach out via PR on github, directly on discord and get an answer and assistance on the go. Core devs are exceptionally involved and helpful, come try it here and there.

6 — A robust grant program is actively supporting devs & projects since day 1!

For the latest updates, the GitHub page can be found here or ALPH’s Twitter page here.

Upcoming Hackathon

The first ever online Alephium hackathon will take place from 12th till 26th of February.

Organized by the Alephium team, supported by the Blockflow DAO, it is offering up to $40.000 in prizes.

Cetacean Capital is delighted to announce it will be contributing an additional $10.000 to the prize pool, bringing the total to $50.000!

Funding Winners

Cetacean Capital was early to recognise the revolutionary potential of Alephium’s technology stack. And our commitment to the chain (and the team) over these last 24 months has only hardened.

Cetacean Capital is broadening its involvement in Alephium’s ecosystem, encompassing both dApps and builders. The fund is dedicated to supporting standout projects that align with their criteria in the upcoming Hackathon, providing investment/seed funding ranging from $50.000 to $1.000.000.

This will catalyze developer adoption and help grow this innovative, game-changing layer one ecosystem.

Join Cetacean Capital & Alephium

You too can participate in key ways in developing an exciting future!

If you are a developer, register to the hackathon and participate with your craziest ideas and best skills. You’ll find great technical resources on Github, in the docs and the tech articles.

If you’re a user, an investor or a service provider, new to Alephium, start with an easy onboarding, dive in the in-depth article series or hit the bible of all content!

You can read more about Cetacean Capital here.