Algorand explained: A sleeping giant?
What is ALGO?
In their own words on the official website
“Algorand builds technology that accelerates the convergence between decentralized and traditional finance by enabling the simple creation of next generation financial products, protocols and exchange of value.”
What is its mission?
Their main goal is to use their high performing foundational blockchain to help power organisations in DeFi, traditional finance and government, comfortably enter the future of finance, or what they call FutureFi.
This is echoed more simply in their mission statement below.
Mission:
Global trust through decentralization
Simple designs that drive adoption by billions of people
Elegant technology that eliminates barriers to prosperity for all
This is all focused on an endgame of a decentralised borderless economy of finance.
What can it’s tech do?
Ok, let’s get to the good stuff.
Algorand is using it’s tech to solve the three most common problems faced by blockchains today
Security, Scalability, and Decentralization.
You may have also heard this referred to as the Blockchain Trilemma.
As part of their dedication to helping organisations navigate the future of finance, their tech will allow:
Creation and deployment of tokens, nft’s, stablecoins, securities and currencies
Simple and cost effect payment infrastructure
Creation of new financial tools, protocols and services.
All very exciting, I’m sure you can agree.
How could it improve the world?
With a permission less consensus mechanism that is a pure proof of stake. Algo’s blockchain tech guarantees full participation, protection, and speed within a truly decentralized network.
I think we can agree that sounds like a good improvement.
Over 500 organisations globally are making use of Algo’s tech, so it’s already developing a solid foundation as a leader in the future of finance.
It’s current ecosystem of applications include ⬇️
And it’s ever growing financial structure already has some of the biggest names in the crypto space.
They also have a ton of use cases already which you can check out here.
I’d recommend checking these out with Circle, Tether and Rhovit.
The team driving it
Algorand has one of the top teams in the world of crypto with some of the most advanced minds.
Silvio Micali is the founder of Algorand and a bit of a celebrity in the crypto world. A past recipient of the Turing award in computer science, the Godel prize for theoretical computer science and the RSA prize in cryptography.
Silvio has also been a serving member of the faculty at MIT’s engineering and computer science department since 1983. And if that’s not enough, Silvio is also the co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Verifiable Random Functions and many of the protocols that are the foundations of modern cryptography.
So you could say he knows a thing or two about creating a great project.
Working with Silvio as CEO we have Steve Kokinos and Sean Ford in the COO role. On top of this, Algorand is backed by a strong leadership team and a host of expert advisors.
The Algorand token
The protocol uses the ALGO token - who would have guessed that?
You can purchase it on almost all the popular exchanges and it comes with a pretty solid staking rate (7%) if you use the official Algorand wallet.
The Algorand foundation (more on that below) has been clear that only 10 billion units of the cryptocurrency will ever be created.
You can dive even deeper into the ALGO token and its many benefits here.
The ALGORAND foundation?
I think I’ll leave it to the team themselves to explain exactly what it is they do:
“The Algorand Foundation is committed to the development of an inclusive and transparent system where anyone can build prosperity through decentralized applications and projects, no matter where they are.
The foundation provides assistance with the network launch, along with initial governance and evolution of the public blockchain, with a primary goal of promoting broad participation and decentralization of the network. The Algorand Foundation is helping make the borderless economy a reality.”
That’s about all I have to share on the Algorand project, protocol and its mission.
I hope this content has been of value and I’d love to hear your thoughts about Algorand too! Share these with me in the comments below.
Important ⬇️
I’m not an financial advisor, this is not financial advice and I’m not qualified or licensed to provide anything like this. This content is a bunch of thoughts from a fellow human for educational purposes only — that is all.