Alephium is a layer-1 sharded blockchain platform that extends Bitcoin's core technologies with scalability, security, and energy efficiency. Founded in 2018, it uses BlockFlow sharding for high throughput (over 20,000 TPS) and Proof-of-Less-Work (PoLW) consensus to reduce energy consumption by up to 87% compared to traditional PoW. The platform supports smart contracts via a stateful UTXO model, a custom VM, and the Ralph programming language, enabling decentralized applications (dApps) and tokens. Alephium is mineable using GPUs and ASICs, with a current network hashrate around 14-16 PH/s. It provides mining tools like solo/pool mining guides and a full node, but does not sell hardware, offer hosting, or operate mining facilities itself. The focus is on protocol development, decentralization, and developer tools.

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