FAQ¶
General¶
What is Altius?
Altius is a high-performance blockchain platform for institutions and demanding financial applications. It pairs Altius L1 — an institutional EVM Layer-1 — with Altius HPEC, a high-performance execution coprocessor that runs intensive workloads off-chain and settles verified results back to the chain.
Is Altius L1 EVM-compatible?
Yes. Altius L1 is a full EVM Layer-1 at the Prague upgrade level, built on a Reth-based stack. Existing smart contracts, ABIs, developer tooling, and wallets work without modification.
What's the difference between Altius L1 and Altius HPEC?
Altius L1 is the EVM Layer-1 and settlement layer — general-purpose, compatible, and the source of truth for custody and finality. Altius HPEC is a specialized, non-EVM execution coprocessor for latency-sensitive, high-throughput workloads; it executes off-chain at high speed and settles verified results to Altius L1.
Does Altius require specialized hardware?
No. Altius is engineered to deliver high performance on commodity infrastructure (standard cloud or on-prem servers), without GPUs or specialized hardware.
What does the name \"Altius\" mean?
"Altius" means "higher" in Latin — echoing the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius. It reflects the mission: raising blockchain performance and operability to new heights.
Technology¶
What consensus does Altius L1 use?
A fast, fixed-interval Byzantine-fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus built on the commonware framework, with deterministic finality. Consensus is decoupled from execution and communicates with the EVM execution layer over the standard Engine API.
How does Altius L1 stay fast as state grows?
State-root computation — traditionally a serial bottleneck — can be offloaded to the SSMT engine, which computes the state root in parallel across worker threads and returns it to the execution client.
What is SSMT?
SSMT (Scalable State Merkle Trie) is a parallel state-root computation engine. It is a single-process engine that connects to an execution client over IPC and parallelizes state-root hashing across worker threads. It is the newest component in the Altius stack and is actively being hardened.
How does HPEC keep funds safe if it executes off-chain?
HPEC uses a dual-state model: a fast working state for off-chain execution, anchored to custody and settlement on Altius L1. On-chain contracts hold assets and record batched state commitments, and a forced-exit path lets users recover funds directly from L1 if HPEC becomes unavailable.
Integration¶
How do applications connect to Altius?
Through standard EVM JSON-RPC for Altius L1 — the same interface used by existing Ethereum tooling. HPEC connects to Altius L1 as its settlement L1 over JSON-RPC.
Can I run Altius locally?
Yes. A devnet orchestrator brings up Altius L1 (as L1) and Altius HPEC (settling to it) together for local development and evaluation. A dedicated guide for this is planned.
Security & maturity¶
How does Altius approach security?
Altius separates concerns so each layer can be reasoned about and tested independently: a compatible, well-governed settlement chain; a specialized execution layer with on-chain custody and a forced-exit safeguard; and operator controls (RBAC, audit logging, on-chain governance). HPEC also ships with simulation and chaos-testing tooling to validate behavior under adversarial conditions.
Is Altius production-ready?
Altius is engineered to production standards. Altius L1 provides deterministic finality and an institutional control plane (on-chain governance, role-based access control, and audit logging), and HPEC pairs high-performance off-chain execution with on-chain custody, a forced-exit safeguard, and extensive simulation and chaos testing. As with any high-performance platform, we recommend validating performance and configuration against your specific workload before going live. The SSMT state-root engine is the newest part of the stack and is actively being hardened — see each component's repository for current status.