Question 1

What is ALPH?

Accepted Answer

ALPH is the native token of the Alephium network. It is used to transfer value on Alephium, pay network fees, and as the asset involved in mining issuance and fee-burning mechanisms in the proof-of-work network; therefore, native ALPH must be distinguished from asset versions on other chains that merely track or wrap ALPH.

Question 2

What are the characteristics of Alephium's UTXO and smart-contract design?

Accepted Answer

Alephium combines proof of work, a UTXO asset model, and smart contracts in one network. Its stateful UTXO model enables assets to be explicitly referenced and spent like UTXOs while allowing smart contracts to retain mutable state; developers deploy applications through a dedicated virtual machine and the Ralph language, while users pay for on-chain operations in ALPH.

Question 3

What roles do PoW and BlockFlow sharding play in Alephium?

Accepted Answer

Alephium uses PoW to produce blocks and maintain network security, and miners can mine solo or join mining pools. The network uses BlockFlow sharding to process transactions in parallel: the goal described in official materials is for multiple shards to work together to increase throughput while maintaining a user experience closer to that of a single chain. Greater processing capacity from sharding does not mean every transaction is free; submitting transactions still requires ALPH to pay network fees.

Question 4

How did the Danube upgrade change ALPH's supply rules?

Accepted Answer

After the Danube upgrade, ALPH mining issuance is no longer constrained by a fixed total-supply cap. In other words, miner rewards have no predetermined final issuance total; however, each mining issuance reward has a 500-minute lockup, so it is not freely spendable immediately after being generated. The pre-upgrade fixed-cap model must not continue to be applied to issuance rules after Danube.

Question 5

How is ALPH issued and burned?

Accepted Answer

ALPH supply is affected by both issuance and burning: mining emissions increase tokens, while the official documentation states that all transaction fees are burned. Whether supply experiences a net increase or decrease over a period depends on the relationship between mining issuance during that period and fees actually burned; “all fees are burned” does not by itself mean total supply will necessarily decline.

Question 6

Why do ALPH's existing allocations also affect the pace of circulation?

Accepted Answer

In addition to ongoing mining issuance, the official tokenomics page lists unlock schedules for existing allocations: seed and private-sale allocations total 80 million ALPH and unlock quarterly over 2 to 4 years; the ecosystem allocation totals 30 million ALPH and unlocks quarterly over 4 years; and the treasury allocation totals 30 million ALPH and unlocks quarterly over 3 years. These are different sources from mining issuance and should be assessed separately when analyzing circulating supply.

Question 7

What is the difference between native ALPH and bridged ALPH on other networks?

Accepted Answer

Native ALPH settles on the Alephium network; ALPH on other networks is usually a bridged version. When transferring across chains, users need to confirm the destination network, asset contract or version, and the bridge's supported scope, because the same ALPH name does not automatically mean that assets are on the same chain or directly interchangeable; the bridging process also introduces the operational risks of both the bridge and the destination chain.

Question 8

What is the relationship between xALPH and ALPH in Powfi Round 0?

Accepted Answer

xALPH is not a general alias for ALPH. In Alephium's official Powfi Round 0 materials, users who stake ALPH receive xALPH as a liquid representation of that staking position, while the underlying ALPH remains staked; following the activity's unstaking process involves a 30-day unlock period. If users choose to sell xALPH on the secondary market to exit early, the execution price, liquidity, and slippage make the outcome different from waiting for unstaking and recovering the underlying ALPH.

Alephium (ALPH) Price