Alephium recently declared a strategic addition, introducing aligned economics through a protocol-owned Core dApp with staking opportunities for its native coin, $ALPH. The announcement was both timely and exciting.

The Swiss-based Proof-of-Work Layer-1 blockchain is led by Founder and Core Developer Cheng Wang. His team has spent years meticulously engineering a Proof-of-Work L1 that is robust, scalable, secure, and even offers a native smart contract environment.

Innovate in haste, or build sustainably on proven foundations. This was a major issue faced by many Layer-1 blockchains. For them, the challenge of solving the trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization simultaneously almost always led to compromises.

This isn’t the case with Alephium’s “no tradeoffs” approach. First, they solved the trilemma, now they’re going even further, building out a Core “killer” dApp.

Why not two years ago? Why not five years from now? It’s hard to argue that there’s ever a perfect time for innovation, but in Alephium’s case, the decision to launch Phase Two is a confluence of readiness and necessity.

Layer-1s Must Choose To Be Neutral Hosts or Catalysts

Three years ago, many Layer 1 blockchains agreed the best approach was actually to have no approach at all. They decided to be more hands-off than hands-on when it came to application development. Their objectives and mantras were to deliver secure, performant, and decentralized base layers.

A powerful foundation should essentially serve as the perfect tool to attract and acquire new builders. Then, after builders come dApps, after dApps comes an ecosystem, and after an ecosystem come grants, partnerships, DAOs, and UX gains.

The L1 acts as the top of the funnel. Logic suggests that with a solid and attractive base layer, third-party developer communities would then feel inclined to build a series of dApps, DEXs, and other liquidity protocols.

This was all sound in theory, but chains matured faster than adoption. Attracting significant institutional capital and DeFi builders became slow and complex even for EVM chains. This problem was further compounded for non-EVM chains. As others waited, Alephium continued engineering its trilemma-solving infrastructure.

Multiple network upgrades and innovations followed, driving massive performance gains, such as block times reducing from 64s to 16s, and then 8s. Usability also improved, through a combination of dexX, UX, speed, and scalability.

Network improvements all added on Alephium’s Proof-of-Less-Work (PoLW) consensus mechanism for energy efficiency (87% less than Bitcoin), native BlockFlow sharding for throughput, high-security stateful UTXO (sUTXO) model, and native smart contract environment (with custom VM+ language).

While Alephium was building and shipping, the DeFi industry largely defaulted to using EVM-compatible Layer-2 chains. Naturally, this meant new chains did not have to build everything from the ground up or experiment with novel technologies.

The lure of EVM chains, however, led countless new projects to build on the same, sub-optimal tech, inheriting the same vulnerabilities, security pitfalls, design and UX flaws, and tradeoffs as each other.

The Alephium team chose to press ahead, committed to their own vision and desired outcomes. They were justified, as being non-EVM allowed them to avoid many of the pitfalls that come with some EVM chains, such as high gas fees, reentrancy attacks, and the inability to easily upgrade or debug smart contracts.

So, as some chains choose EVM-compatibility, and other L1s opt to take the “hands off” approach, Alephium’s stance is refreshing. They join Hyperliquid and Injective, two projects that have also demonstrated the power of building a “killer dApp” to showcase their chain’s impressive capabilities and attract users.

“Build It And They Will Come” May Never Be Enough for Non-EVM Chains

Despite building a custom virtual machine (ALPHred) and its own high-performance programming language (Ralph), both of which prevent common reentrancy and approval exploits at the VM level, Alephium will still have to win over the EVM crowd.

A high level of innovation is now the L1’s biggest adoption challenge, as builders and institutions seek simplicity.

“They said Layer 1 blockchains had to compromise: performance for decentralization, usability for security. Alephium chose a different path.” – Alephium Spokesperson

On-chain hedge managers, capital firms, and other entities with substantial AUM operate on a well-established DeFi playbook, deploying capital and applications exclusively across EVM-compatible chains.

It’s plain to see why they’d take this route. Code written in Solidity can be easily duplicated, audited, and re-deployed with minimal re-engineering, giving institutions the “strong guarantees” and audit trails they require.

Since EVM has become the norm, getting partners and support is much harder for those outside the EVM circle. The problem, however, isn’t getting devs. It’s getting top-tier projects that will attract liquidity to the ecosystem. Many investors lack the confidence required to trust a 3rd party dApp or start their DeFi journey on it.

This led Alephium to start building a protocol-owned dApp, in-house. Some may feel a DEX and $ALPH staking are overdue. Others may appreciate Alephium’s focus on creating the “perfect” base layer first. Both may now be satisfied with the announcement.

Further community encouragement may also come from the news that the Research & Development team at Alephium continues to explore breakthrough innovations that could push the boundaries of scalable PoW even further.

Phase Two is Alephium’s Pivot Towards Self-Sustaining Growth

Recognizing the two-sided dynamic, Alephium shared its “Phase 2: Aligned Economics” article on X. Importantly, they’re not abandoning the “neutral host” philosophy of passive blockchains entirely, but instead aim to introduce a new catalyst for ecosystem growth.

The roadmap involves building out an essential “Core dApp” directly, starting with a Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker (CLMM) DEX.

Alephium’s Core dApp will be a protocol-owned, open-source benchmark, that claims to be robust, audited, and institution-ready. It addresses their stated need for “strong guarantees” from large AUM entities head-on, essentially becoming the necessary proof-of-concept.

As a critical piece of the puzzle, this development aims to remove friction for larger players. It also aims to encourage broader ecosystem involvement from DeFi builders, especially those looking to move away from EVM chains and find a new home with better security, developer experience, and longevity.

For a non-EVM chain like Alephium, which doesn’t have the luxury of duplicating existing EVM smart contracts, the outcome of this in-house development will be crucial.

Why “Aligned Economics” Activates a Self-Reinforcing Loop

Phase 2 plans for aligned economics, connecting token utility directly to real usage and chain adoption. This is something missing with many inflationary Layer 1 models, which have struggled to make the leap from speculation and governance to tangible value and compounding utility.

“The problem L1s face is that in the past they were all about narrative and infrastructure. Right now, I think it’s more about utility. It’s about how the protocol can generate its own revenue. One of the best examples is Hyperliquid. It’s an L1, but one of the most profitable dApps in the space. That profit goes directly to the protocol to buy back the tokens and spin the flywheel.” – Alephium Founder, Cheng Wang

In addition, staking ALPH for xALPH will give participants access to composable DeFi strategies, more governance rights through DAO frameworks, and other ecosystem perks. As such, $ALPH should progress from a largely passive asset into an active component of Alephium’s yield-generating ecosystem.

The design is a self-reinforcing loop. Usage on the Core dApp will generate fees, while these fees will drive both burns (tightening supply) and rewards for ALPH stakers (incentivizing long-term holding). The L1 believes this will initiate a period of experimentation, adoption, and TVL growth.

“There’s a very big opportunity here that allows us to leverage ALPH as the token for the dApp and therefore bring utility and yield and serve as the cornerstone for the ecosystem to build on. In addition, of course, there’s an opportunity to develop primitives that really leverage Alephium’s unique design, ones that are open source and a great foundation for people to build on… The Core dApp will act as a bootstrap, magnet, and catalyst for the broader Alephium ecosystem, making us a more desirable prospect for users, liquidity providers, and builders, as well as institutions and large AUM entities.”” – Maud Bannwart, Alephium COO

The Perfect Storm of Readiness and Necessity

Firstly, Alephium is ready. It offers battle-tested optimizations for performance, security, and decentralization, with plans for ongoing major network upgrades. Secondly, the market has also matured. Now, Alephium’s Core dApp development reflects these dual realities.

Has Alephium’s moment to leverage its technical superiority for an aligned economic model finally arrived? The key message here appears to be “more utility, less dilution.” This is a practical and pragmatic approach to ecosystem growth and development.

The timing is ideal, as is to be expected of a Swiss blockchain. This is especially true as Circle, Google, and Stripe have all recently announced they are building L1s. We may well be entering “L1 Season” and the start of a new market trend. If that’s the case, Alephium is already one step ahead.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alephium

Website: www.alephium.org

Telegram: https://t.me/alephiumgroup

Discord: https://discord.gg/XC5JaaDT7z

Docs: https://docs.alephium.org/

Wallets: https://alephium.org/#wallets