Posts about Algorand
It's September 2021: the Algorand price just hit $2.38, Algonauts are everywhere, and the CryptoCurrency sub is best described as a living shill for the Algorand blockchain.
The Excitement is enticing and contagious as Algorand locks in one partnership after another, but behind the scenes... A Series of Unfortunate Events are Begining to Unwind, and what was once a promising blockchain to laugh and make jokes about - is quietly becoming a disaster for investors.
This post is not a technical breakdown of Algorand nor is this post meant to fud the future of Algorand. This post is about the absolute disaster that continues to unravel for investors of the Algorand Blockchain.
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If someone told you about Algorand they probably also told you it was founded by Silvio Micali "a cryptography pioneer, Turing award winner and MIT professor". Algorand launched in 2019 and hails itself as a Pure Proof of Stake (PPOS). The most notable difference from traditional Proof of Stake (POS), is that the creator of the next block is selected randomly irrespective of their total stake. As the name implies this approach is touted by Algorand supporters as a more fair and decentralized version of POS.
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Like most crypto projects Algorand absolutely blew up in 2021, it started the year under $.40 and it ended the yearover 4x around ~$1.65. However unlike most crypto projects that peaked in early November Algorand peaked in September.
https://i.redd.it/0jgjkqekoloa1.pngWhat sounds like an interesting side note, holds a much darker truth for investors - Algorand inflated by 533% in 2021, as the circulating supply jumped from 1.19B to 6.37B - and 12% in 2022 from 6.37B to 7.14B. If you line up the graph for the increase in circulating supply to price, you can see the September 2021 peak lined up with a large surge in the circulating supply and a steady drop in price since.
https://i.redd.it/oqzgptvwemoa1.png------------------------------
In January of 2022 the prior CEO of the Algorand Foundation was quietly ousted from the company, and replaced with the new CEO Staci Warden. The replacement has been incredibly controversial inside the Algorand Community as the new Foundation CEO thought one of the major priorities for the Algorand Foundation was to focus on PR.
https://twitter.com/StaciW_DC/status/1499202881647489025Additionally she's been largely criticized for acting childish and immature in her public statements - with statements that are meant to create "baseless hype" which leads to Algorand believers holding even larger underwater bags. If you have ever heard of Staci before it's probably for her, "Nike" tweet.
https://i.redd.it/ds8gyyfxuqoa1.pngThis one word tweet, lead people to believe big things were imminent for Algorand Investors with a potential Nike Partnership. Instead it was later revealed that Staci had hired a former Nike Executive as the Chief Marketing Officer for Algorand.
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If you are familiar with Algorand Tokenomics you probably know, Algorand has a max supply of 10B and the beginning Centralization of Tokens with the Algorand team was one of the worst things about Algorand.
https://i.redd.it/1r9ia3fgipoa1.pngAs you can see, Algorand itself was one of the initial largest holder of Algorand. When a Crypto organization needs to raise funds - they do that by selling their tokens, and that's exactly what the Algorand Foundation did. To the Foundations credit, they make bi-annual Transparency Reports that detail how much they sold and sometimes what those funds were used for. Below is a breakdown of the sales from October 2020 - September 2022 time period. Links to Transparency Reports information was gathered from: 1, 2, 3, 4 .
Numbers in AlgoIn the Past two years the Algorand Foundation has sold 228M Algo and Paid their Board of Directors another 3.65M Algo. Important: these numbers do not include Algo given out for for ecosystem development - That includes another ~400M Algo over two years, some of which may have also been sold.
The past few years have been huge for Partnerships with Algorand, it seemed like every week the Algorand Foundation was announcing a new partnership. But most of these were just glorified real-world Sponsorships that Algorand paid for, that came with an Agreement to do do something on the Algorand blockchain, like FIFAs NFT flop.
https://i.redd.it/df9n4vqiypoa1.pngAnnounced in May 2022, Algorand became the official blockchain partner of FIFA. Immediately after the announcement the price of Algorand spiked 20%, but what investors had hoped would be game changing for the Algorand network - ended up as just another disappointment. In September 2022, FIFA launched an NFT project on the Algorand Blockchain - with over 205,000 mints, at a cost of $5 each and low resale interest: the project just ended up being a further $1M cash grab for FIFA.
The Algorand Logo was not on display as a partner during the Fifa world cup. Additionally there was not an ad or Algorand TV Spot during the world cup, something Algorand supporters had hoped to see.
Under the guidance of the new Foundation CEO Staci and a pivot to focus on PR - Algorand the "Greenest Blockchain", planned a huge marketing stunt for Earth Day 2022. They rented the time square billboards for one hour to black them out. Then they intermittently flashed them Green with the Algorand logo and text about how Algo energy consumption compares to BTC.
Source: https://shortyawards.com/7th-impact/algorand-earth-day?trk=public_post_feed-article-contentOf course the money for this publicity stunt, had to come from somewhere, and that money came from dumping Algo on Investors. From April - September 2022. The Algorand Foundation spent $22.2M on "Marketing and other forms of ecosystem promotion" which was raised by selling Algorand. In the prior six months, they only spent 9M in the same category.
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In late February MyAlgo was hacked and some of the largest holders on Algorand saw over $9M in Crypto drained. A week later smaller holders on MyAlgo also started to see their crypto drained in what at the time seemed like Bots draining wallets.
Image taken from a /u/Odlavso postMyAlgo will be releasing the Preliminary Findings on the Hack tomorrow, Mar. 20th 2023.
In January 2022 TinyMan was hacked and $3M was drained from Algorand ASAs (tokens). Source
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With all of these problems and the continuous sell pressure from the Algorand Foundation - Algo's price has continued to drop over the bear market. One Algorand was selling for nearly ~$2.40 in Sep. 2021, and is now selling for $.22. If Algorand tech can turn around the nightmare that is occurring for Algorand investors is another question.... but one thing is certain - A series of Unfortunate Events has made Investing in Algorand an absolute nightmare.
TLDR: What was once a loved project shilled endlessly by this sub has quickly and quietly turned into a nightmare for anyone still left in the project.
Edit: Since some people think analyzing the failures of Algorand over the past 18 month is "hating Algo and Fud", please read the post again. The inevitable comments about "This sub hates Algo now, I Guess that Means It's Time to Buy" misses the entire point of this post.
EDIT #1: WE ARE LIVE!
EDIT #2: The AMA is now over! Thank you very much Gary, Anne, Bob and Paul for chatting with our community today. See you all soon!
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ALGO fam, welcome to our AMA - Ask me Anything - with the Algorand Inc tech team!
You can start posting your questions now and the Algorand team will respond all they can for one hour starting at 2pm EDT today.
https://i.redd.it/lva5aj5oiapa1.pngThis AMA will be held by:
u/algogmalouf, Gary Malouf - Head of Engineering at Algorand Inc
u/algoanne - Anne Kenyon, Director of Product Management at Algorand Inc
u/bbroderma - Bob Broderick, Principal Software Engineer at Algorand Inc
u/estantef - Head of Product Marketing at the Algorand Foundation, Host
u/cysec_ - Digital Community Champion at the Algorand Foundation, Host
u/HashMapsData2Value - Digital Community Champion at the Algorand Foundation, Host
Recently Algorand Inc released a protocol upgrade that included several great features that are currently in BetaNet.
BetaNet release: https://github.com/algorand/go-algorand/releases/tag/v3.15.0-beta
Simulate: https://medium.com/algorand/try-before-you-buy-on-algorand-5acd1b9617d1
Conduit: https://twitter.com/algoanne_/status/1638567790494859267
And why is Simulate awesome?
Well, it allows you to evaluate transactions without altering the state of the blockchain!
And what other cool stuff is out there on the 3.15 release?
TEAL MACROS!
According to Anne, macros help with repetitive code and simplify TEAL writing. Macros also help the readability and auditability of TEAL, even if you're using a high level language.
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The Algorand Inc tech team has been very kind to come for this AMA and answer your questions, but there are a few rules:
Be respectful. If your question is not respectful, you likely will not receive an answer.
Keep questions related to the tech. Implementation, areas of research, roadmap, curiosities, etc.
And at last, we all know this team is AMAZING, but check out their bios:
Gary has built and scaled engineering teams across a spectrum of companies (startups through public), with significant achievement in the large scale data / event processing space. He joins Algorand from Wayfair, where he led the teams responsible for their customer information platform (DMP), bootstrapped their ML platform org, and scaled the onsite Media / sponsored products platform; the latter growing 3x into a $100 million recurring revenue business over an 18 month span. Before Wayfair, Gary held several technical leadership roles including head of engineering at OfferLogic (acquired by Rokt) and chief architect for a digital media trading startup. Gary completed his Bachelor's of Science degree in Applied Mathematics at Marist College and a Master's of Science in Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University.
Trained at MIT as a computer scientist, Bob's analytical talent has led him to become an experienced investor with a track record of identifying opportunities in areas of outsized potential growth. He began his investment career on the floor of the American Stock Exchange and went on to develop quantitative research-driven pricing strategies at JPMorgan Chase, Soros Fund Management, and Bloomberg, where he managed a team of quantitative software engineers. Bob established Uji Capital LLC, a consumer-focused equity investment office with a specialty in cannabis and cannabis research philanthropy at preeminent institutions. Bob holds a Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Master of Arts in East Asian studies from Harvard University.
And now onto the best part.. SEND YOUR QUESTIONS!
I just checked defillama, after filtering by "chains", i noticed that they now include "active users" count for each chain. You can see here: https://defillama.com/chains
A standout to me was Avax. It has 25k active users on defi and $815M TVL. For comparison Algorand has 27k active users, $150M TVL. So despite Avax having 3.5X higher marketcap, and 5.4X higher TVL, Algorand still has more active users... This shows how much of a real community algorand has. Algorand is grassroots, retail driven, really community driven. These other chains have massive VC backing and massive hype, but no real community.
We would like to share with the Algorand community a thread on the recent MyAlgo security incident and our thoughts to support the victims during this challenging time.
As key participants in the Algorand ecosystem, we feel truly sorry for all the victims of this unfortunate event and we understand the need for our ecosystem champions to step up and show support to the entire community at this moment.
First and foremost: If you have not already done so, now is the time to rekey or move the assets to a new Pera Algo Wallet or Defly wallet!
Some of our portfolio companies were significantly impacted by the loss incurred in this hack. As their VC partners, we are working to do our best to provide investment support to mitigate the impact, so that they can recover and continue to operate in the ecosystem.
This is one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced in the Algorand ecosystem and it will require a coordinated effort to make sure that we can, together, bring light to these dark times and move forward towards our future with the least possible negative impact.
As a member of the Algorand Foundation Governance Advisory Committee, we would like to propose the creation of a 50M $ALGO Recovery Fund, anchored with the treasury of the Algorand Foundation and open to contributions from third parties including other ecosystem investors.
In light of unprecedented community urgency, we suggest it should be included as a 3rd measure to be voted on before the end of the current governance period of Q1 2023.
If the community votes in favor and approves the creation of the Recovery Fund, Borderless will contribute 2.5M ALGO on top of the amount that the governance community deems appropriate to be used from the Algorand Foundation treasury.
Due to the total losses and in an effort to make all the victims whole, we propose that the current Algorand blockchain ALGO fees that are now going to the Algorand Foundation treasury wallets should be allocated to this Recovery Fund until the community is fully restituted.
As it relates to the intricacies of restitution through the Recovery Fund, we are extremely eager to help the Algorand Foundation, along with other major ecosystem participants to quickly develop a process and work alongside third parties to have an orderly distribution of funds.
We hope this initiative will be supported by the broader community of Algorand users, builders, node runners, investors and all other participants, and together we will come out of this incident stronger than ever!
Source: https://twitter.com/borderless_cap/status/1633911425822236676
Last week on February 20th it was reported that over 13 million ALGOs were stolen from different users, it appears that all of these users were using a My Algorand browser based wallet. MyAlgo tweeted this morning recommending that all users move assets off any Mnemonic wallet stored on MyAlgo site.
If you have a hardware wallet linked to MyAlgo your crypto should be fine since your seed phrase was never on their website.
It also appears that Pera wallets are not affected buy hardware wallet would be best.
John Woods the CTO of the Algorand foundation made a statement that the hack was not a problem with Algorand itself.
Multiple users have lost millions of ALGOs in this hack
Gard protocol a DeFi platform on Algorand was also affected by the recent hack, no users funds were taken but it appears a portion of their operating funds were.
Things to do
move your funds to a hardware wallet if possible.
move your funds to hot wallet that isn't My Algorand wallet
you could also rekey your current wallet (advanced) https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-details/accounts/rekey/