The Birth of Abelian — Digital Gold 2.0
A Quantum-Resistant Cryptocurrency Balancing PBitcoinrivacy and Accountability
Abelian is the brainchild of the dynamic four:
Bob, Eve, Lamda, and Me (Alice).
Alice, Bob, Eve, Lamda (ABEL).
We have all seen the blessings that Bitcoin has given to our world. The legend Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008. This was the birth of Bitcoin (BTC), a store-value means or simply a digital gold solution. With the birth came the beginning of the Blockchain — a platform to transfer digital assets from one person to another without the need for a middleman, bringing about decentralization — all using the principles of computer science. This revolutionary technology transformed the world and changed people’s lives for the better. It got rid of the negative effects of centralization, diminished wealth inequalities around the world, and created lots of opportunities for developers.
For the first time in history, we see a significant shift of what we understand about assets — where digital assets by themselves carry value which mean even more heavily than a state-owned fiat currency like the US Dollar. BTC has really created and gave birth to a bright future. It’s possibly one of the best inventions till date.
Decentralization and security. Bitcoin’s qualities. Everyone knows about them. But Bitcoin may not be as secure as you think. That’s due to something called quantum computers.
Quantum computing harnesses the collective properties of quantum states, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement, to perform calculations. The devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Quantum computing also advances the entire computing technology which makes weather forecast much more accurate, financial analytics more precise, and the discovery of new medicine much faster and effective.
Wow, impressive, but… so what? Why should I even care?
Answer is you should care. Long story short, you can think about quantum computers as powerful machines that can perform high level algorithms and tasks. But on the other hand, quantum computers also have the power to remove all current political, social, and economic structures that run online. Which means that Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, gmail, the sites you use everyday, could be removed by a quantum computer.
You would be concerned by just reading the previous paragraph. Oh no, how can I even live without Instagram???
But what if I told you that quantum computers has the power to remove Bitcoin?
Yup, you read correctly. Lemme just repeat this one more time — QUANTUM COMPUTERS HAS THE POWER TO DESTROY BITCOIN. So if the king of all the blockchains in the world is not quantum resistant, that means that Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, XRP, you name it — will be removed.
You’ll probably know what will happen to the world after an event like this. It won’t look nice.
Scientists from the University of Sussex in the UK estimate that quantum systems with 13 million qubits would be sufficient to break the cryptographic algorithm (elliptic curve based cryptography) that secures the Bitcoin blockchain within the space of 24 hours.
(www.techradar.com/news/quantum-computers-may-be-able-to-break-bitcoin-sooner-than-you-think#:~:text=Scientists%20from%20the%20University%20of,the%20space%20of%2024%20hours)
13 million qubits sounds a lot for a quantum computer. You might think that this benchmark will only be achieved in hundreds, thousands, millions of years later. But it might be achieved sooner than you expect :
2019, Google and IBM, independently, built their 53-qubit quantum computers.
2021, Boston startup, QuEra, built a 256-qubit quantum computer.
2022, IBM announced that they will complete building a 1,000-qubit computer next year.
PsiQuantum has raised $215 million from major tech investors including Microsoft to build a quantum computer with one million qubits.
It’s self explanatory. It’s going to be soon that a quantum computer can destroy Bitcoin and the blockchain.
Hence the race to build a quantum resistant blockchain has commenced.
Post-quantum cryptography is the development of cryptographic systems for classical computers to defend against attacks launched by quantum computers.
The goal of post-quantum cryptography (also called quantum-resistant cryptography) is to develop cryptographic systems that are secure against both quantum and classical computers, and can interoperate with existing communications protocols and networks.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), currently used by Bitcoin and other Blockchain systems, is not quantum safe. Researchers https://doi.org/10.1116/5.0073075 estimate that a quantum computer with 1.9 billion qubits would be able to crack the Bitcoin system within 10 minutes. To manage the feat within an hour, a machine only needs 317 million qubits.
Researchers and developers are racing towards building the first scientifically proven secure and live post-quantum Blockchain systems.
Our mission is to be the first to make this dream come true.
And we have done so since 2018. We have created a blockchain that is quantum resistant, defendable against quantum computer attacks.
We have created a blockchain that is quantum resistant, defendable against quantum computer attacks
Since then, after 4 years of research and development, Abelian mainnet was live early this year and is scheduled to make its first public announcement in Q4 2022. In the meantime as this article is being written, we are busy building more handy tools including mining software, block explorer and wallet for developers and supporters once after the official announcement.
You can think of Abelian as like this: Abelian is basically Bitcoin but Abelian’s blockchain is defendable against quantum computers (quantum-resistant), whereas Bitcoin is not.
But Abelian is more than about being a quantum resistant blockchain:
Everything going on in the Abelian blockchain is encrypted. Seriously. Just like you don’t always want anyone to know how much money you have in each of your bank accounts, and you don’t always want anyone to know where you receive your money from and whom you send your money to.
Abelian makes use of lattice-based linkable ring signature scheme to support sender anonymity and untraceability. Lemme explain :
On Abelian, your wallet address is hidden among a set of wallet addresses in every transaction you make, bringing about a new level of privacy preservation to the blockchain. Bitcoin dosen’t have this feature, which means that Abelian is more secure and privacy preserving than Bitcoin.
To hide the amount of ABEL coins in a transaction, Abelian has designed and proven secure a lattice-based commitment scheme together with a lattice-based zero-knowledge proof system so that the transaction amount is hidden while double spending is infeasible.
Also, your Abelian wallet address changes every time you use it, bringing your privacy to the next level of untraceability and unlinkability. On Bitcoin network, however, prying eyes can always trace and link your transactions.
These revolutionary feature that we added to Abelian is game changing in the development of Web3. Now you can transfer tokens from one wallet address to one another without anyone knowing the exact amount being sent to.
In addition to designing, developing and deploying Abelian platform, we are building up an open community for Abelian. It is a journey that we collaboratively build and use as a truly decentralized and quantum-resistant Blockchain ecosystem with privacy-preserving functionalities.
Side chains, smart contracts, and inter-operability will be developed for supporting various DeFi, Metaverse, web3 applications and initiatives.
Yes, you’ve heard that correctly. With our quantum resistant blockchain, we are bringing utility to it in the future so a lot of exciting projects can be developed on Abelian.
Abelian processes only 10 transactions per second (TPS) and will later be upgraded to 16 TPS (where Bitcoin’s is 7 TPS).
On the Blockchain trilemma, namely, scalability, security and decentralization, Abelian needs improvement on scalability while excelling in security and decentralization.
Open source and an open community consisting of developers will be established for expanding an Abelian post-quantum Blockchain ecosystem.
Sidechains and protocols (e.g. lightning-like) will be created for supporting EVM-type smart contracts, high scalability and inter-operability. These will serve as the foundation of DeFi, Web3 and metaverse applications.
Abelian is currently on PoW, is compatible with Bitcoin. It will be upgraded to PoS for better scalability, and environmental benefits.
Now that we had a look on the Abelian blockchain, let’s have a look on the blood of Abelian — ABEL, Abelian’s native cryptocurrency. Transactions on the Abelian blockchain will be in ABEL tokens.
At the initial launch, ABEL is a quantum-resistant privacy coin. But in 2023, Abelian will be “upgraded” to support three privacy levels for users to choose from:
- pseudonymity: just like Bitcoin
- sender-hiding and amount-hiding: as of the privacy coin ABEL in Q4 2022
- totally anonymous and untraceable: one level up to include receiver-hiding
Pseudonymity: a pure privacy coin may not be the most welcomed cryptocurrency, due to many reasons, which include regulatory and KYC related concerns. We do believe that quantum-resistant privacy coin has its unique value as a real digital cold.
Accountability: according to the whitepaper, we also target to achieve privacy with accountability, namely, an ABEL transaction is totally anonymous and untraceable while at the same time, allows some authorities or regulatory bodies to trace through some build-in verifiable encryption trapdoors.
Having options like this allows for users to choose their own level of privacy for the ABEL token while staying quantum resistant and following regulatory guidelines.
Here’s also a brief outline of the ABEL tokenomics. You can read a more in depth version of it on our whitepaper:
- TOTAL SUPPLY OF ABEL = 225.18 million ABELs or 2^51–1 Neutrinos where 1 ABEL = 10^7 Neutrinos.
- 256 secs block frequency
- 400,000 blocks per era (3.25 years)
- 256 ABELs block reward in the 1st era
- Halving happens after each era. 0.5 ABEL block reward in the final era.
- Altogether 10 eras, 32.5 years.
- 20.58 million ABELs were pre-mined in the Genesis Block, that count towards 9.14% of the total ABEL supply.
This is just the beginning of the digital gold 2.0 — ABEL. Abelian, the post-quantum blockchain. That’s all I have to say at the moment.
The future looks very bright for ABEL.
Oh right — I forgot to mention — the Abelian whitepaper is out. You can go check out a more in depth introduction to Abelian and how we actually managed to create Abelian.
Website, and community building Discord and Twitter accounts are all in place for the official launch in Q4.
The future looks very bright for Abelian.
Alice