Alephium Blockchain ID Specification

Abstract

In CAIP-2 a general blockchain identification scheme is defined. This is the implementation of CAIP-2 for Alephium network.

Rationale

Alephium is a sharded blockchain that organizes addresses and states into distinct groups. The blockchain id includes both the network id and the group information.

Each transaction has an origin and destination group. All transactions from by addresses in group G1 to addresses in group G2 will be included in chain G1 -> G2. If there are G groups on Alephium, there will be G*G chains inside of it. In Alephium, groups are like cities and chains are like roads connecting them.

Both contract and address belong to a group. A contract deployed in one group can only be interacted with directly with an address from the same group. Therefore it is common for a dApp deployed in one group to request connection to an address within the same group. However a dApp deployed in all groups might request connection with an address from any group.

The Network id can be one of three values: mainnet, testnet and devnet.

Currently, Alephium has 4 groups. The group component of the blockchain id can take one of five values: 0, 1, 2 and 3 which correspond to groups 0 through 3, and -1 which represents any group.

Syntax

The chain_id is a case-insensitive string in the form

chain_id:    alephium + ":" + group + "_" + network_id
network_id:  mainnet, testnet or devnet
group:       0, 1, 2, 3 or -1

For information that is not network or group specific, there is a special chain id alephium:universal.

Test Cases

This is a list of manually composed examples

# Alephium mainnet, group 0
alephium:0_mainnet

# Alephium testnet, any group
alephium:-1_testnet

References

• Blockflow
• API Endpoints

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

Citation

Please cite this document as:

Hongchao Liu, "namespaces/alephium-caip2: Alephium Blockchain ID Specification [DRAFT]," Chain Agnostic Namespaces, alephium-caip2, June 2024 / June 2024. [Online serial]. Available: https://github.com/ChainAgnostic/namespaces/alephium-caip2.md