Alephium (ALPH): what it is, how it is mined and with which ASIC miners

Alephium (ALPH) is a Proof of Work cryptocurrency that is one of the few to combine mining with sharding: the network runs on 16 parallel chains and a new block is created on average roughly every half second. It is mined with the Blake3 algorithm, today practically only on ASIC miners such as the Bitmain Antminer AL1 or IceRiver AL0. At an exchange rate of around USD 0.06 (as of 18 Oct 2026), however, earnings do not cover electricity even in cheap hosting.

Summary

• Alephium has had its mainnet since 2021. Besides payments, it supports smart contracts built on an extended UTXO model.
• The network splits work into 16 parallel chains (BlockFlow sharding). Since the Danube upgrade on 15 Jul 2025, each chain produces a block every 8 seconds.
• The block reward has no halving. It is tied to both time and network hashrate, so it falls as hashrate grows.
• As of 18 Oct 2026, the Antminer AL1 Pro earns about 73 ALPH a day gross (≈ CZK 93), but uses more than CZK 100 of electricity even at CZK 1.13/kWh.

What Alephium is and how it differs

The Alephium mainnet has been running since 2021. It builds on Bitcoin's ideas – mining, the UTXO model, fixed coin issuance rules – but tries to solve its slowness. A classic blockchain processes one block after another. Alephium divides addresses into groups and processes transactions between them in parallel on multiple chains.

The second difference is smart contracts. Alephium uses the so-called stateful UTXO: balances are held as in Bitcoin, but contracts can remember state as on Ethereum. The application ecosystem is still considerably smaller than on the big platforms.

Since launch, the network has gone through several upgrades. The last major one, Danube (15 Jul 2025), shortened the block time on a single chain from 16 to 8 seconds, introduced addresses that no longer require dealing with groups, and added a permanent “tail” emission that will start in roughly 80 years.

How Alephium is mined: Blake3, sharding and Proof of Less Work

Alephium mining is based on the Blake3 hash function. The miner does not compute a single chain but receives work for all 16 chains at once. Overall, the network creates a block on average roughly every 0.5 seconds (8 s ÷ 16 chains). For miners this means smooth payouts without big swings in luck.

The consensus is called Proof of Less Work (PoLW). It is ordinary Proof of Work with a safeguard: once network hashrate exceeds a certain threshold, part of the work is replaced by burning ALPH. This way energy consumption should not grow indefinitely. The mechanism is only meant to kick in at high hashrate.

Block reward and emission

Alephium has no halving like Bitcoin. The block reward is the lower of two values: one derived from time and the other from network hashrate. The more machines mine, the smaller the reward a block carries. As of 18 Oct 2026, a block carries about 0.14 ALPH. In total, around 23,000 ALPH are mined per day, and network hashrate is about 5.1 PH/s.

At launch, 140 million ALPH were created (sale, ecosystem development, team). The original cap was 1 billion coins, 86% of them for miners over roughly 81 years. Since the Danube upgrade the cap no longer applies, and after the original schedule ends, emission will continue at a small rate.

How much Alephium mining earns today

We don't have live data for Alephium in our shop, so we give our own calculation as of 18 Oct 2026. We start from Kryptex data: an Antminer AL1 Pro (16.6 TH/s) mines 72.7 ALPH a day, i.e. about 4.38 ALPH per 1 TH/s. ALPH exchange rate USD 0.0594, USD 1 ≈ CZK 21.5.

The amounts are gross, before the pool fee. CZK 5/kWh corresponds to a household tariff; CZK 1.13/kWh is the cheapest location of our ASIC miner hosting. At today's exchange rate, every machine is therefore at a slight loss even in hosting. Kryptex shows a small profit of about USD 0.73 a day for the AL1 Pro, but only with very cheap electricity, an estimated USD 0.04/kWh or so (≈ CZK 0.86).

Be careful when comparing efficiency with Bitcoin. The AL1 Pro runs at 225 J/TH, while SHA-256 Bitcoin miners use much less. But a Blake3 hash and a SHA-256 hash are not the same work, so J/TH cannot be compared across algorithms. The only yardstick is earnings in koruna against consumption.

Which ASIC miner to use for Alephium

Blake3 can be mined on graphics cards, but since ASICs arrived in 2024 they have no chance of a profit. Today Alephium is mined on two types of machines: small quiet boxes for the home and industrial Bitmain miners for the data centre. All of them can only run Blake3, i.e. only Alephium.

The Antminer AL1 measures 37 × 29 × 19.5 cm and weighs 13.2 kg; the Pro version is 3 cm longer and 0.4 kg heavier. With 75 dB of noise and a power draw of over 3.5 kW, it does not belong in a flat. These two models have the best efficiency, so anyone mining Alephium at scale does it with them. One AL1 replaces roughly 43 Goldshell AL Box units in hashrate.

The small AL0 and AL Box machines are economical and plug into a normal socket. At today's exchange rate, however, they mine just a few koruna a day. They serve as an entry into the world of mining and for trying out a pool and wallet, but not as a source of income. Don't confuse the names with the IceRiver AE series – that one is for the Aleo coin.

Pools and wallets for Alephium

Thanks to its fast blocks, Alephium mines well even in smaller pools. For example, as of 18 Oct 2026 Kryptex Pool showed a hashrate of around 490 TH/s, roughly a tenth of the network.

1. Install the official Alephium wallet, for example the Extension Wallet for Chrome or Firefox recommended by the developers. Write down the recovery phrase offline.
2. Copy your ALPH address. Since the Danube upgrade you no longer need to worry about which group the address belongs to.
3. In the miner's web interface, enter the pool's stratum address, your address as the user and the machine name after a dot.
4. After 20–30 minutes, check on the pool's page that the hashrate matches the label. Also check the minimum payout.

Risks of mining Alephium

• Low exchange rate and small liquidity. A market capitalisation of around USD 8 million (as of 18 Oct 2026) means that selling a larger quantity of coins can push the price down.
• Falling reward. The block reward decreases as hashrate grows. Every new machine on the network takes from the others.
• Single-purpose hardware. A Blake3 ASIC cannot mine another coin. When profitability falls, so does the price of the machines on the second-hand market.
• Concentration of hashrate. A large part of the hashrate is served by a few pools, and the machines are made by only a few companies (Bitmain, IceRiver, Goldshell).
• Protocol changes. Upgrades such as Danube changed both block time and emission. Further changes may affect miners' earnings.

Alephium is a technically sophisticated project, but mining today is more a bet on future price growth than a regular income.

What next

• ASIC miner profitability – a live comparison of machines for Bitcoin, Kaspa, Litecoin and other coins. It shows which algorithms earn more today.
• Kaspa (KAS) – another fast PoW coin with parallel blocks, but using a BlockDAG instead of sharding.
• ASIC miner hosting – if you are considering an industrial machine, cheap electricity decides between profit and loss.

Sources

• Alephium: Danube upgrade – FAQ
• Alephium: tokenomics and block rewards
• Kryptex: Antminer AL1 and AL1 Pro – specifications
• Kryptex: Alephium – network status