What is Litheum

Litheum is a third generation blockchain incorporating a state machine in the form of an EVM and advanced capabilities for cross chain and third party data validation that enables a new paradigm in capabilities for decentralized application development.

By leveraging a new type of consensus which we call proof of performance Litheum is able to push the cost of blockchain usage down to physical limitations. Because proof of performance uses the blockchain itself as the difficulty, as demand for Litheum increases it both becomes more secure or performant.

In practical terms this means that the block size is determined via supply and demand dynamics rather than by an artificially imposed limitation. For more details you can find the light paper, deep dive, and White paper.

What this means for decentralized application and infrastructure development is that Litheum offers an opportunity to build experiences where gas is a much less troublesome consideration. Although blockchains must be more expensive than centralized solutions by nature of the fact that the state must be maintained by thousands of nodes, the nodes which run Litheum, the runners, are incentivized to deploy the hardware which is needed by users to run decentralized applications.

Because of the fundamental approach which we've taken to design proof of performance, which we call True Decentralization, and our understanding that a consensus is a win win between all players of the network, Litheum thrives under high usage. That is to say, as users and decentralized applications demand more, Litheum becomes more capable and a win win is maintained between the network, the decentralized application, it’s users.

This means that Litheum encourages usage of all sort rather than limiting usage which ultimately prices out the majority of decentralized applications. because the ultimate limits of with Litheum's capability are bound by the price point of deploying and maintaining Hardware, we believe that a new paradigm of decentralized applications can be realized.

Before we discuss the details of how to develop decentralized applications and infrastructure on Litheum we first want to discuss in some detail why we believe that Litheum is able to scale compromising decentralization, which you'll find in the next section.

We believe that this is important for application developers to understand as the concept of true decentralization can be leveraged to impact not only Litheum itself but also the applications which rest upon it.