Robert

Urgent Network Announcement Dear Alephium community, Earlier today, the network began experiencing significantly increased block times due to a sudden spike in difficulty. After investigation, we identified the root cause: a sharp drop in hashrate combined with a specific aspect of our difficulty adjustment algorithm. We are actively working on a solution and will publish a detailed post-mortem once the issue is fully resolved. ⚠️ This will require an urgent network upgrade to restore normal chain operation. All node operators must prepare to update their infrastructure accordingly. Next Steps: 1. DAA Change Development The update is currently under development and testing. It will be released with a clearly defined activation timestamp, coordinated with mining pools. 2. Critical: Node Upgrade All miners, mining pools, and operators of key services must upgrade their nodes before the activation timestamp to remain in sync with the network. 3. Activation At the scheduled timestamp, the new DAA will activate, and difficulty will begin adjusting under the new logic. We will provide exact timing and detailed upgrade instructions as soon as the release is ready. Until then, network difficulty and block times will continue to rise, causing transactions to be processed increasingly slowly. We appreciate your patience as we focus all efforts on resolving the situation. Thank you for your continued support. The Alephium Team

Fourth-generation blockchains are more scalable, scarce & decentralized! 🔥 The old guard does not stand a chance, as BTC & ETH do not scale... That is why real adoption, apps & revenue have to come from the alts! Overtaking speculation with chains that provide real value: 🧵 Achieving a capacity of 10k+ TPS has become the new norm, orders of magnitude better than BTC & ETH! There are several advanced scaling techniques that enable massive throughput on-chain today: Parallelization The most prominent being a pure parallelized approach, which is also the fastest, within a sub-second confirmation range! Prominent examples include: SOL, SUI, APT, ALGO & SEI This involves ensuring concurance across multiple physical cores within a single machine, allowing validators to take full advantage of modern chips with multi-threading! Sharding This scaling technology enables us to truly solve the blockchain trilemma, as it allows us to increase capacity without increasing node requirements. Allowing us to exceed 1M TPS, making it the most scalable blockchain technology available today. Prominent examples include: TON, NEAR, EGLD, SUPRA & ALPH Sharding takes concurance to the next level by splitting the workload between groups of validators (shards). Allowing us to exceed the limitations of a single physical machine, allowing for true horizontal scaling to meet all possible demand! Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) Only a few years ago, I did not consider DAGs to be viable; I was gladly proven wrong, as the problem of a decentralized consensus on a DAG has been solved. DAGs are both fast & scalable, only really limited by the need to maintain a global state. Prominent examples include: KAS, S, IOTA, XNO & TARA Instead of grouping TXs into blocks, DAGs treat TXs like "mini blocks" as part of a branching tree structure. Allowing for confirmation before it has fully propagated across the gossip network. That is what makes DAGs so fast! Scarcity The question of economic design is a more contentious one. The ideal design, from my perspective, is low tail inflation combined with a fee burn. Prominent examples include: ETH, SOL, TON, NEAR, & APT This allows for greater scarcity, even full-on supply deflation during times of high economic activity & at least still keeps the chain secure during periods of low economic activity! Unlike traditional chains with a supply cap, which are insecure & ultimately less scarce! Decentralization Measuring decentralization objectively can give surprising results, especially when compared to the popular narratives... So these examples are in order of decentralization: ETH, ADA, SOL, AVAX & DOT In this case, I took several metrics: validator count, Nakamoto Coefficient, economic security, & combined them into a single ranking. Overly simplistic, granted, but it fits into this thread's format & still manages to cut through a lot of the BS! Conclusion Crypto is here to stay, thanks to the utility it offers. Something that is still underappreciated & underserved by the top blockchains today This represents the opportunity of a lifetime, as the adoption of blockchain tech is accelerating at a breakneck pace, putting the old guard to shame That is why we need chains that can scale massively right now, while preserving decentralization. Because that is the only way we can bring Bitcoin's original vision to fruition! 🔥

"I think I just murdered a squirrel getting into my pit box," Ty Dillon says. Team confirms that is what happened.