Next-Gen PoW Chain Alephium Prepares DeFi Engine Amidst DEX Boom

Alephium

NEUCHÂTEL, Switzerland, Oct. 22, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As the decentralized exchange (DEX) sector continues to register immense trading volumes, a clear trend is emerging at the infrastructure layer. There is a renewed demand for security, credible neutrality, and scalable Layer-1 (L1) foundations.

The Swiss Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain, Alephium ($ALPH), is leveraging this environment to activate its next phase of development. This strategic move is centered around introducing protocol-owned DEX and native staking to create a self-sustaining economy.

Alephium’s strategy is designed to address the core challenges facing the multi-billion dollar DeFi market, namely endemic security risks on smart contract platforms, network congestion that fragments liquidity, and extractive value behaviour from airdrop farmers and VCs.

The Infrastructure vs. Incentives Debate in DeFi

The current DEX market is dominated by varied models, each highlighting infrastructural challenges. Market leaders like Uniswap (on Ethereum L1 and L2s) showcase high liquidity, but often grapple with network congestion and high fees during peak demand. Meanwhile, perpetual DEXs like Hyperliquid, which runs on its own high-performance L1 (of the same name), prioritize execution speed and deep liquidity for professional traders.

The rapid growth of newcomers like Aster and existing platforms like PancakeSwap (both on BNB Smart Chain) illustrates the divergent strategies of modern DEXs. While PancakeSwap leveraged the lower-fee, faster block time environment of a centralized L1, Aster's exponential growth was largely fueled by aggressive airdrop incentives and narrative-driven activity.

These realities underscore a key question for DeFi infrastructure. Can sustained growth be achieved primarily through temporary incentives and hype, or must it be anchored in a foundation that guarantees security, longevity and predictable performance? Alephium’s approach is a direct challenge to the former, arguing that infrastructure integrity is the necessary condition for long-term viability.

Alephium

Phase One: The Scalable PoW Foundation

Alephium's initial development phase focused on solving the scalability challenge often associated with all blockchains. The network is built on three core innovations, BlockFlow Sharding, Stateful UTXO (sUTXO), and Proof-of-Less-Work (PoLW).

Starting with BlockFlow Sharding, this is a native sharding architecture that processes transactions in parallel across multiple chains, allowing Alephium to achieve over 20,000 transactions per second. Critically, BlockFlow is designed to eliminate the fragmentation and complex cross-chain bridging issues that plague other sharding or Layer-2 solutions, maintaining a single-chain experience for users.

Alephium’s Stateful UTXO (sUTXO) is a unique model which merges the security principles of Bitcoin’s UTXO model with the expressivity of an Account-Based model for smart contracts. This architecture is cited as a key security differentiator, as it introduces built-in safeguards at the Virtual Machine (VM) level that prevent common DeFi exploits, such as reentrancy attacks and unlimited token approvals.

By enhancing PoW with its unique Proof-of-Less-Work (PoLW) consensus, Alephium also retains the decentralization of PoW, while eventually reducing energy consumption by up to 87% at large scale when placed under the same network conditions as Bitcoin.

Phase Two: Activating Aligned Economics and Liquidity

With its technical foundation established, Alephium is entering its second major chapter, focused on creating an aligned and sustainable on-chain economy through a Core dApp and $ALPH staking.

The Core dApp, set to launch as a Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker (CLMM) DEX, is positioned not as a competitor to existing platforms within the ecosystem, but as the network’s native economic engine. Alephium aims to grow the TVL pie for everything built on it.

Intended to be protocol-owned, open-source, and open for integrations via API, the core dApp should serve as a trusted benchmark for future ecosystem development. At the same time, 100% of the swap fees generated by the Core dApp will be redistributed into the ecosystem. A portion of the fees will be used for $ALPH buybacks and burns, with the remainder distributed to $ALPH stakers.

This mechanism is designed to create genuine deflationary pressure and reward long-term conviction. Alephium has called this “The Aligned Ecosystem Loop”, a structure that links network usage directly to the strength of the native asset. As transaction volume increases on the DEX, the resulting fees fuel buybacks and burns.

Staking will also create a cohort of long term supporters of the ecosystem, which helps for the governance (voting) and tokenomics design (airdrops, fee mechanisms, rewards, etc) of the dApps built on Alephium. This will increase the overall composibility of the ecosystem, with protocol-owned liquidity flowing into other ecosystem projects to enhance their Total Value Locked (TVL) and overall utility.

Alephium

Positioning in the DEX Landscape

The current DEX landscape, marked by significant growth from platforms like Uniswap and Hyperliquid, underscores that the success of a decentralized exchange is inextricably tied to the security and performance of its host L1. Congestion and fragmentation in the underlying infrastructure directly translate to poor user experience, unreliable fees, and operational risk for DeFi users.

Alephium’s Phase Two is a direct attempt to provide a robust alternative by building its core liquidity on a foundation that is secured by the VM and is credibly neutral through its PoW consensus. There are no compromises or trade-offs.

The focus on a highly secure, scalable, and economically aligned architecture aims to position Alephium as a long-term settlement layer for institutional-grade and high-value DeFi applications, stablecoins, RWA, and other user cases that need tokens at scale with high security levels.

Contact:
Joseph Kennedy
Head of Marketing & Growth
joseph.kennedy@alephium.org
www.x.com/alephium

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Alephium

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