I'm not seeing a lot about this on Reddit, so here are a few words from the new CMO of the Algorand Foundation:

"Algorand's native support for Python stands alone. Our release with AlgoKit 2.0 introduces regular, semantically normal Python as Algorand's canonical language. Developers can write code in the exact Python language they know, and it magically compiles to AVM bytecode.

By writing syntactically correct Python, rather than in a "Python-like", or "It-smells-like-Python-but-it-isn't" language , it enables compatibility with Python-native tooling. It also enables developers to share reusable Python code via pip with standard Python module tooling and import it in their smart contracts.

Algorand is the first Layer 1 to support native Python and meet the millions of Python developers where they are, with the tools they like to use and and dev environments they're used to.

And yes, it is a first in the blockchain industry and a very big deal!"

• Marc V.

Solving the Blockchain Trilemma

Algorand (ALGO) is a blockchain network (i.e. like ETH, ADA, SOL) that attempts to solve the "blockchain trilemma" - the ability of a network to be simultaneously scalable, secure and decentralised. ALGO's transactions per second (TPS) is 1k, with a 4s finality. Transactions cost 0.001 ALGO and the network already offers L1 smart contracts. However, the network will be upgraded in Q3-Q4 2021 to 45k/s TPS and 2.5s finality, ranking it toward the top for speed and scalability . ALGO is currently experiencing ~1m transactions per day, placing it close to ETH in usage.

Main Conclusion: ALGO is, along with other projects, building and pioneering "Blockchain 3.0".

Academic Rigor

Algorand was founded by the Turing-award-winning, MIT professor Silvio Micali - and is backed by an excellent team with solid peer-reviewed academic prowess and publication record . Silvio Micali conceived of and pioneered zero-knowledge proofs (among many other concepts) - a key and integral part of many cryptocurrencies. ALGO's respectable and trustworthy team boosts ALGO's chances of mass adoption, especially in the financial/institutional sectors - which appears to be ALGO's key target demographic.

Main Conclusion: ALGO's reliability, technology and ability to form partnerships is bolstered by the prestige and talent of its team.

Pure Proof-of-Stake

Algorand uses pure proof-of-stake (PPoS) as a consensus mechanism, which employs algorithmic randomness and an improved form of Byzantine agreement to achieve decentralisation + security. PPoS differs from regular, delegated PoS (dPoS) in a number of ways, including:

• No pooled validators (i.e. holders do not pledge their coins to a minority of super-validators). Theoretically, this minimises the drive toward centralisation that dPoS suffers from.

• ALGO node running is permissionless (i.e. anybody with >1 ALGO can run a node, be a validator and participate in consensus).

• PPoS is extremely lightweight (an ALGO node can be run on a low energy, $50 Raspberry Pi 4 - no expensive hardware or upfront cost is required).

A key feature of PPoS is the use of a randomised, weighted lottery that selects validators - known as VRF. This prevents any malicious actor(s) from attacking the network since the identities of the currently selected validators (who must be corrupted in order to carry out an attack) are not known until the block is already finalised. At 1-4k validators, PPoS is paradoxically superior to dPoS in terms of decentralisation - even if the latter had 50,000+ nodes. This is because validators under the dPoS system are long-lived and known. By contrast, ALGO's random selections vary on both a round and subround basis - that is, block proposers, voters, vote certifiers all vary, across all steps of creating a block - making it incredibly secure and decentralised.

Main Conclusion: ALGO is fast, scalable, secure while remaining decentralised.

Staking Rewards & Governance

ALGO currently offers liquid and seamless staking with an APY of ~5.75% - you simply hold ALGO in a non-custodial wallet and there is no lock-up period. On Oct 1st 2021, governance is launching and this will gradually replace staking. In exchange for voting on proposals, you will be rewarded with 7.5-33% APY (depending on the number of participants). For the initial 3 months, this APY will be in addition to the passive 5.75%, meaning you could theoretically earn up to ~38.75% APY. Governance will not only allow ALGO holders to vote on changes to the network, consensus mechanism or tokenomics - but also select projects to receive developer grants (see below).

Main Conclusion: ALGO offers highly competitive staking APYs and will further decentralise by handing voting power to holders.

Carbon Negative

PPoS is extremely lightweight - consuming ~0.000008 kWh per transaction . That's ~70,000x less energy than ADA, and 116250000x less energy than BTC.

The energy that is used by ALGO is 100%+ offset via carbon credits. An on-chain sustainability oracle analyses the energy utilised by each node and a partnership with ClimateTrade (and others) then channels this funding into reforestation, peat management and wind-energy projects .

Main Conclusion: ALGO is eco-friendly, and the world's first carbon-negative blockchain network.

Developer Friendly & Ecosystem

Algorand is extremely accessible to developers . Most importantly, it supports development in Python, C++, GO, Java, Javascript and RUST - removing the need for developers to retrain or learn new languages. ALGO's smart contract language, TEAL, is incredibly intuitive and can be accessed via Python (PyTEAL). As of TEAL 4.0, the language is now fully Turing-complete. In addition, Algorand offers comprehensive, detailed documentation and tutorials (for free) - see Source 1.

Moreover, ~$200-250m is available to support developers and 50+ grants have already been issued . In total, ~600-650 companies are currently developing on ALGO and intend to deploy DApps/ALGO-based services .

Yieldly, ALGO's first DeFi app launched, ~2-3 months ago and has enjoyed a high TVL since. A number of high profile projects, including ALGO's first DEX are launching shortly this year. Tokenized, real-estate projects (e.g. ) are also currently operating successfully on ALGO.

Main Conclusion: ALGO has the ability to instantly attract developers, and is poised for an explosion in its ecosystem.

Real World Use

A key feature of Algorand is that it is forkless - it is mathematically impossible for ALGO to fork . This is extremely important for real-world usage. Businesses accepting ALGO will not only experience rapid finality but can trust that the transaction is not on a forked branch of the blockchain that can be lost. This is even more important for NFTs. Thus far, ALGO has seen major adoption, recently including:

• 70M South Americans (potentially 200M soon) using ALGO to issue + store COVID-19 passports

• BNext adopting ALGO for its $100b/year Spain<->Latin American remittance service

• MAPay adopting ALGO to power $800m/year in healthcare payments for Bermuda

• SIAE, one of the largest and oldest digital rights management companies in the world, launched 4.5m NFTs onto ALGO - representing the work of 10,000 artists and which will involve $100m/year in royalties .

• ALGO was recently featured in a World Economic Forum (WEF) report on cryptocurrency - listed as a recommended "VIP" blockchain that solves issues with BTC/ETH and proof-of-stake . This document will be seen by institutions, banks and economists worldwide.

The list goes on and on

Main Conclusion: ALGO is already being deployed for large-scale and institutional solutions.

Tokenomics

ALGO has a maximum supply of 10,000,000,000 (10b) coins, and ~57% of the supply has been released so far. The schedule for coin release is detailed here: . In addition to this, ALGO operates an 'accelerated vesting' algorithm: if the 30-day moving average (30MA) reaches a new ATH, the rate at which new ALGO is introduced into circulation is accelerated. The combined effect of this is a significant rate of annual inflation - and artifical suppression of price i.e. ALGO is not a short-term investment. Inflation will ease over time for 2 reasons:

• Accelerated vesting is estimated to end in ~mid-2023

• Coin release slows over time (see the above source), and we are already ~18-24mo ahead of schedule - so it's very unlikely that it will take until 2030 to finish the process.

Eventually, suppression of the price will cease. Until then, ALGO exploit this stability to build large-scale partnerships since less volatility is often viewed favourably.

Main Conclusion: ALGO's tokenomics are less than ideal, and the project is to be seen as a long-term investment only.

Relay Nodes & Initial Distribution

ALGO relies on a set of ~100-120 relay nodes to maintain high-speed transactions. Relay nodes are distinct from participation nodes (which participate + drive PPoS consensus) - they simply direct traffic (i.e. an ISP). In order to reward early backers (i.e. relay node runners), a large amount of ALGO was allocated to them. This raises concerns of centralisation. Algorand have acknowledged this, and are now opening up relay node running to the community . This will, however, require more expensive hardware. The details are listed in the above source.

Moreover, the Algorand Foundation also own a significant portion of ALGO. However, the foundation is non-profit and this ALGO is used to fund R&D directly and issue developer grants. Because of this, the % the foundation own is diminishing over time.

Main Conclusion: ALGO appear to have favoured developing a stable blockchain and securing major partnerships first, before moving toward decentralisation second.

Final Conclusion: For a chain that launched only ~2y ago (June 2019), it has accomplished a great deal and its future, to me, seems extremely bright - however - only consider it if you're prepared to hold.

The latest upgrades:

• Smart contract compatibility with contract to contract calls.  This allows complex dApps to be built that can efficiently and trustlessly interact with other smart contract based dApps to extend functionality and usability.  Additional details and background on this tech can be found . 

• Post-quantum secure Falcon Keys, Algorand’s first major milestone on its path towards trustless cross-chain interoperability.  These keys will, in the near future, be used to generate State Proofs, a new blockchain infrastructure that will allow Algorand to be trustlessly accessed in low-power environments like mobile phones, smart watches, and on other blockchains. For more background on State Proofs, please see an overview . 

Developers are now able to build complex dapps for the Algorand ecosystem with smart contract-to-contract calling and network participants can take their first step towards trustless cross-chain interoperability with quantum-secure keys for the upcoming State Proof technology. These network upgrades come on the heels of a $20 million incentive program from the Algorand Foundation focused on developer tooling and, putting Algorand at the forefront of blockchain interoperability and post-quantum security while providing features for even more advanced decentralized applications. 

These features add to Algorand’s already advanced tech, high performance and robust developer resources. Smart contracts on Algorand can be written in Python or Reach, making it accessible for developers of all skillsets. 

Algorand has experienced zero downtime since launch, helping it become the blockchain of choice for hundreds of organizations launching DeFi protocols, NFTs, payment solutions, regulated digital assets, and more. The network supports applications that can scale to billions of participants, all on a high-speed, carbon-negative, secure and stable blockchain. 

It would seem Algorand is currently bucking the trend and seeing some green in an otherwise red few days.

With that, it also jumped up to number 18 having held the number 21 spot a week ago. Today alone its overtaken Uniswap and Litecoin.

It seems to be performing well during this latest crash/dip/correction or whatever you want to call it.

It's left me feeling even more bullish on this project and got me thinking those that hold it are keeping a level head, where other investors seem to be losing theirs.

I've never understood the need or desire to sell when there's a dip, but looks like the Algonaughts are all on the same page.

Happy hunting, hope you've been enjoying these pre Christmas sales. Interested to know what you've been buying these past few days?

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.

------------------------------

I. A Brief Introduction to Algorand:

If someone told you about Algorand they probably also told you "a cryptography pioneer, Turing award winner and MIT professor". Algorand launched in 2019 and hails itself as a (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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II. The Beginning of an Inflationary Nightmare for Investors:

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.

What sounds like an interesting side note, holds a much darker truth for investors - , as the circulating supply jumped from 1.19B to 6.37B - and 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.

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III. A Controversial Change in Leadership

In the prior CEO of the Algorand Foundation was quietly ousted from the company, and replaced with the 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.

Additionally 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, .

This 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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IV. A Disaster in "Marketing" - Part 1: An Introduction

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.

As 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: , , , .

In 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.

A Disaster in "Marketing" - Part 2: Partnerships

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.

Announced in May 2022, . 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.

Additionally there was not an ad or Algorand TV Spot during the world cup, something Algorand supporters had hoped to see.

A Disaster in "Marketing" - Part 3: Advertisements

Under the guidance of the new Foundation CEO Staci and a pivot to focus on PR - Algorand the "Greenest Blockchain", . 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.

Of 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. on "Marketing and other forms of ecosystem promotion" which was raised by selling Algorand. In the prior six months, in the same category.

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V. MyAlgo Hack and TinyMan Hack

In late February MyAlgo was hacked and some of the largest holders on 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.

the Preliminary Findings on the Hack tomorrow, Mar. 20th 2023.

In January 2022 TinyMan was hacked and $3M was drained from Algorand ASAs (tokens).

------------------------------

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.

I ran into this coin earlier this year. Bought small amount and hold it. I didn't DCA further after finding out more coins will be released on the market over several years.

I also experiment with DeFi first time using Algorand chain. Funny cos I honestly thought my first DeFi experience would be on Cardano's chain. I'm too poor to use ETH chain.

I must say, I'm very impressed by how smooth and cheap the experience was. I haven't researched much on what's been going on with Algorand but I was surprised to see its dedicated ASA subreddit has 18k members. Memecoins and scam coins are booming in that sub. Almost every day there's an airdrop, either scam or not.

Usually, if I'm not mistake, this the sign the chain has good traction. Even when there are many scam coins running on it. I imagine like in Pancakeswap era.

Is Algorand's future that bright? Could it reach Top 5 one day? Are you all start swapping and allocating more ALGOS or experimenting with their ASAs? What ASA you most excited about?

I haven't seen any ASA hitting major exchanges so I'm curious if it'll be a thing one day?

A lot of us invested in Algorand. I also bought some a few years ago. Back in those days, all of us were very bullish and positive. Algorand was all over Reddit and other social media websites and news websites. Algorand got some strong partners over the years.

Fast forward to 2023, and Algorand is a little under $0.11. Yet it used to trade at $3.15 in 2019 and $2.30 in 2021. Relative to Bitcoin, Algorand is even down 99% since 2019.

Actually, from the start of 2023:

So while Bitcoin is up 85% and Ethereum up 57%, Algorand is down 40%. This means that $1000 invested in these three cryptocurrencies would give you $1850 (Bitcoin), $1570 (Ethereum), or $600 (Algorand). That is an INSANE difference.

For perspective, XRP is 40% up, Litecoin 36% up, Polkadot 18% up, ADA 16% up, and Solana 120% up. Almost every other alt is outperforming Algorand since the start of the year.

What happened? Where did this go wrong? Cant believe how bad Algorand is performing.

This airdrop will be for 5,000. There will be several more airdrop rounds coming as we expand the project.

Only the first 1,000 comments that follow the rules will receive the airdrop.

Rule #1: Your Algorand Wallet needs to be posted BEFORE any other comments. You're welcome to say whatever you want after pasting your wallet address.

Rule #2: Make sure you have opted into the ASA, which is ID 401901597. If you didn't opt in before posting you will not qualify for the airdrop.

If you are wanting to help provide liquidity on Tinyman, please let me know and we can work something out.

Our team is hoping this ASA can rival Akita Inu and help raise awareness of the ease and value of ASAs.

EDIT: Spammers are slowing this down. Will start blocking them and you won't be able to participate in future airdrops.

This is our second of 10 rounds. The first round was 1,000 tokens yesterday that started with a secret Twitter campaign that showed me how powerful reddit is. So still learning how to use this platform.

Future airdrop rounds will continue to increase the drop amount.

EDIT 2: We're experiencing some technical difficulties sending the airdrop out. Rest assured if you followed the rules and are in the first 1,000 your airdrop will land when we can get to you. Thank you for your patience!

EDIT 3: Taking the airdrip bot offline for a bit. It keeps getting stuck from the wallet freezing and not allowing transactions to go through. Need to figure out why for future drops.

Also, we've blocked 23 accounts so far who posted their wallet more than once. Don't be greedy!

We will be working on the project a lot this week. Early adopters with big bags will be happy by end of the year!

We hope to be able to deliver the rest the air drop tonight. This post will be edited one last time when drop #2 is complete.

FINAL EDIT: Airdrop Round 2 is now complete. Be on the lookout for Round 3 later this week! In the meantime I'm looking for liquidity providers so hit me up if you're interested.

In the meantime, we're on Tinyman if you missed out. Akita Inu, watch out! We're coming after you!

Hi all,

The purpose of this post is to attempt to clear up some common misconceptions regarding Algorand. I’m not going to go into why I believe Algorand is a sleeping giant as there are plenty of resources that cover off Pure Proof of Stake and the benefits this design brings to the blockchain world. That said, there are a number of prevailing misconceptions that lead to a fairly common and erroneous understanding of how Algorand works. I don’t claim to understand Algorand perfectly, and these points are purposefully high level as a detailed explainer wouldn't fit one point let alone all 3!

Disclaimer - obviously a substantial amount of my crypto portfolio is in ALGO.

Also, thank you to , , , , , and whose own posts elsewhere helped me to understand and compile this :)

TL;DR

Algorand has a long term vision seeking genuine, institutional level, mass adoption. Consequently, Algorand has been designed to achieve this goal even if its chosen methods may be at odds with what is the generally accepted way to do things in the crypto community. Issues relating to tokenomics and centralization are misunderstood mechanics that in theory actually serve to increase Algorand’s chances of succeeding.

Issue #1 - Tokenomics

It’s complicated. More so than any crypto I’ve ever invested in before. Algorand’s perceived subdued price action (at least in comparison to other popular projects) can appear to be by design but in truth, the mechanics causing this tweaks volatility at best. Algorand’s tokenomics have two triggers in this regard:

• Accelerated vesting/release of additional ALGO that occurs when the 30 day moving average hits a new all time high. This has not happened since April. Importantly, this will cease in 2023 (unless a governance decision alters that which is never off the table).

• Continuous distribution of early relay node operator rewards increases the supply of ALGO into the ecosystem for stability. This does act as a deflationary mechanism however the hard cap on total ALGO has not changed. Contrary to the odd belief that people with big stakes would want to see their investment reduce in value (as this was a known mechanism when they signed up) this acts as an incentive to grow the network and it’s value.

The perception that Algorand’s tokenomics are bad undoubtedly stems from the poorly received ICO (which used a Dutch auction and isn’t exactly in the spirit of decentralization) and the impact the above mechanics had when used as originally planned. Unfortunately the ICO was seen to be murky at best, and the mechanics intended to reduce volatility were too effective. The price tanked. Algorand cancelled a second planned auction and went back to the board and tweaked the system to be what it is today.

But why go to all this trouble? Algorand is pitching it’s capabilities to banks, governments, and wall street. To be effective in achieving its goals Algorand must demonstrate general professionalism in what is perceived to be a very unprofessional space. Algorand works hard to stay away from both the FUD and hype, instead focusing on securing their ISDA and trying to demonstrate a stable product in stark contrast to the volatility that is a lot of the crypto space. In this context reduced volatility is a strength, not a weakness. This sets Algorand apart.

Algorand is not seeking instant success. It’s seeking mass adoption and this approach, while different and generally seen as “bad” in this community, is considered a key enabler in making that happen. If you genuinely want to consider the positives regarding Algorand’s tokenomics, it’s that time is on the side of small-scale investors to accumulate as much as possible at a reasonable price before scarcity enters the frame. All of the pieces are in place, dApps are coming, and Algorand’s ecosystem is set to explode.

EDIT 7th September 2021: .

Issue #2 - Technical centralization

From a technical standpoint Algorand is more centralized than blockchain purists would like, and yet it is actually nowhere near centralized. The decentralization, security, and scalability properties of Algorand will improve as the network matures, so the centralization argument is more about Algorand’s youth than its design. That said, understanding Algorand’s design may help you see that things are not as bad as they might appear if you only ever get your technical information from certain parts of Reddit.

There are two types of nodes on the Algorand network; relay and participation, and to conflate them is to misunderstand how Algorand works:

• Relay nodes form the communication network and are responsible for the high transaction throughput that Algorand is capable of. Relay nodes do not perform consensus but do enable the participation nodes to remain disconnected and less vulnerable to attack. Relay nodes are needed to add blocks but cannot affect the integrity of block composition or the chain. If every single relay node turned malicious, the impact would be to stall transactions on the network until an honest relay is re-established. Relay nodes cannot destroy the integrity of the blockchain.

• Participation nodes provide the actual consensus by creating, validating, and certifying blocks.

Like most blockchains, increasing the number of nodes improves the decentralization, scalability, and security of the network. Anyone can run a relay or participation node, but will not be rewarded for doing so (for now). Required specifications to run a relay node are quite steep, particularly on the network side, so most people opt to run a participation node which can be run on something as simple as a Raspberry Pi and 0.1 ALGO.

The talk about centralization stems from the fact that at this point in time relay nodes are only really being run by 100 early investors, commercial entities and non-profits (Universities). In the context of existing mainstream systems, 100 independent operators is very decentralized, but in the crypto context it may as well be a single computer.

Algorand’s design also allows decentralization to be easily expanded and improved, but once the ecosystem is mature enough and not before. This is wholly aligned with the slow and steady approach touched on in issue #1. The Algorand network is approaching this transition point, but may still be a year or more out.

Lastly, when decentralized governance kicks in later this year it will, in theory, eventually decide the relay node white list / the need for a white list / the incentives for running a relay node. So as Algorand matures all holders will be given the opportunity to vote on how this is handled, not just the existing relay node operators.

Issue #3 - Governance centralization

While technical centralization is a misnomer, governance centralization is unfortunately a little more accurate but once again isn’t as bad as first impressions may indicate even when compared to its peers. Decentralized governance is coming, starting Q4 of this calendar year as a hybrid between the current automated staking system in parallel with governance rewards. This will then switch entirely to governance only rewards starting Q1, 2022.

The problem Algorand has is that early founders secured themselves a golden ticket by being preselected to run relay nodes, with huge initial funding and ongoing super staking rewards. They earn huge fees for running relay nodes, which compounds their stake, giving them an even more disproportionate amount of control over governance. These early relay operators will end up with +30% of all Algos in existence, assuming they don’t sell.

This issue leads us back to the perception of centralization in that a small group is occupying most of the decision making power. In general, the main value proposition of blockchain is that it’s meant to be trust-less without relying on an institution to be honest. The forthcoming governance model will be a one-algo-one-vote situation, so those early adopters will have the lion's share of votes going forward. So even with governance moving on-chain, Algorand may still have a centralization problem.

However, as with everything in this not-at-all-biased explainer, I’d happily compare Algorand with its peers. In reality some of the more established and successful projects (if price was the sole measure of success) with their large mining pools have a far more concentrated balance of power than Algorand. Additionally, a bigger stake equals more to lose so larger actors in the Algorand ecosystem should act in the best interest of the network. They logically want to protect and grow the value of their investment and I for one am happy to let them have their say because one ALGO is the same no matter who holds it. If they do something to increase the value proposition of the network, and in turn the value of ALGO, then it is literally a win for all holders.

My Personal Opinion

Algorand is going after big business and doing it in a way that is more aligned with what big business would traditionally expect. This is at odds with crypto ideals and undoubtedly where the skepticism regarding Algorand comes from. Teething issues at ICO exacerbated the problem. This doesn't make Algorand a bad investment and those early issues are now thankfully behind us. Of course time will tell if things work out as intended, but this is no different to literally every other project in the cryptosphere. Algorand is in my humble opinion one of the most solid investments you can make in this space.

That's all I have (for now). Thank you for reading. Have a lovely day :)

Update: I've made several adjustments based on comment feedback for any inaccuracies.

Summary:

Algorand is a decentralized, fast-finality, moderate-throughput, forkless, monolithic, gasless, smart contract network with very low transaction fees.

It's very cheap and easy to use. But it also has high inflation and no plans for economic sustainability past 2030. It's the only popular PoS network that does not plan to pay for its network security in the long run. These issues are not due to its basic protocol and design, but due to how it's managed by the Algorand Foundation. The Foundation has focused on marketing and short-term growth at all costs, sacrificing stability and sustainability.

Part 1 - Algorand Basics

Launch

Algorand was launched in June 2019 with a pre-minted 10B max token supply that was originally planned to be completely-distributed by 2024. The goal was to design a blockchain that could solve the Trilemma. Instead of solving the Trilemma, it settled on an optimal point with very low fees, moderately-high speed, and moderate security.

Consensus

• Algorand Consensus Protocol is a variation of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), similar to what most Proof of Stake networks use. It has deterministic finality and has no mining. Even if it increased its validator count to 4000, it would be .

• Its specific version of BFT uses a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to randomly (weighted by stake) select a single proposer for the block in secrecy. This provides more security since attackers won't know the proposer and selectively attack it in time. Once the proposer account has been selected, a new committee of validators checks for invalid transaction in the proposed block before certifying it for submission.

• Algorand uses for consensus (block proposal and vote). Unfortunately, nothing is tracking the staking weight of the participation nodes, so we can't estimate the security of the network. Algorand also uses ~120 relay nodes for routing connections between all other nodes and acting as archive nodes.

• Unlike most other PoS networks, Algorand does not expect to pay for its network security in the future. Instead, it expects both its participation and relay nodes to continue running altruistically without any rewards. I'm very skeptical on whether this is sustainable given long-term bandwidth and storage requirements. Even if it decided to use the transaction fee sink from its community rewards, its current yearly transactions fees are so low that they couldn't even pay for a single engineer's salary.

• No slashing and the Nothing-at-Stake issue:

  • Algorand doesn't slash for misbehavior, doesn't use lockup periods, and doesn't use delegators. Thus, it has a moderate Nothing-at-Stake problem. There are zero economic incentives for participation nodes to keep them honest, and they're free to mess around without any punishment for misbehavior. To counteract this, Algorand uses a high threshold of roughly 70-80% (depending on committee size) for safety during its certify vote. Thus, it's practically impossible to compromise Alogrand's safety unless the nearly the whole network is corrupt. The downside is that if 20-30% of nodes are dishonest, the network will fail liveliness and stall.

  • On the other hand, Algorand uses PPoS instead of Delegated PoS, so the chances of any single validator growing very large due to delegation is much lower than for DPoS or protocols with pools like Ethereum. On other blockchains, pooled staking can grow to a significant portion of the total stake (e.g. ). Unfortunately, we currently don't know how much is being held by individual Algorand nodes because there's no Explorer tracking them.

Performance and Scaling

• Fast deterministic finality: Algorand's finality is deterministic and of which 0.5s is spent on the block proposal. This is faster than most EVM-compatible blockchains, and fast enough to use it as a Medium-of-Exchange for point-of-sales systems.

• Moderately-High TPS: Algorand supports 1K TPS even with AVM smart contracts (though it's currently only seeing 15 TPS of actual activity due to low demand). Its throughput is high compared to current demand, so it hasn't experienced any congestion.

  • Uncertain future scaling: Throughput could theoretically scale to with higher block sizes and block pipelining. I would treat this with extreme skepticism. Their 2021 Performance report predicted 2.5s finality and 46K TPS by the end of 2021, and neither update is even scheduled as of mid 2022. It's also very impractical because 46K TPS requires ~500TB of monthly bandwidth and ~100TB of storage. That's an extremely high amount of data without sharding or multilayer chains.

  • No sharding: Speaking of sharding, Algorand is not planning to use it. Sharding has limitations because it produces forked versions of the blockchain that need to be reconciled, which goes against Algorand's design principles. It would also increase time to finality and introduces additional complexity.

  • Block Pipelining is a future scaling solution that could increase throughput by 5x to around 5K TPS. It works by allowing the network to begin working on the next blocks (e.g. 4 blocks) before the current block is finalized. Current stats show that only 1% of blocks fail to stage successfully, so block pipelining should work 95% of the time.

  • Storage: Unfortunately, as with every monolithic blockchain, there's no good solution to long-term storage bloat. If Algorand ever reaches the 3000 TPS it needs to be economically-sustainable at its current fee structure, its ledger would grow 6TB in size monthly. You cannot expect archival nodes to run altruistically with that much storage. And if you're running an Indexer with an Archive node, you need 3-5x that amount. State proofs won't address this. Fortunately, participation nodes by default only . Mainnet is currently during a bear market. That's still a lot of monthly bandwidth and could be very expensive in certain 3rd-world countries where low bandwidth caps are common (like America).

• Low demand: We have rarely seen the mainnet go above 50 TPS in the past several years due to lack of demand. This is one of the biggest concerns for Algorand insiders and why they have spent so much money on marketing lately. Without high demand, their transaction fees are insufficient to sustain the network security.

• Monolithic: Algorand is a monolithic blockchain and does not have plans for Layer 2 scaling. The downside is that its ecosystem can't support layered application-specific blockchains.

• No outages: The Algorand mainnet since its launch in 2019. (The closest was in Oct 2021 when OVH cloud service went down and took half of Algorand's network with it.) Its competitors Solana (multiple times, major), Avalanche (Jan 2022), Polygon (Mar 2022), Fantom (Feb 2021) have all had outages.

Smart Contracts

• Algorand has that use TEAL, a Turing-complete language. Both types are atomic (all-or-nothing) and forkless.

  • Layer 1: L1 contracts are for basic operations (e.g. token swaps) and can be directly computed by consensus in a single round. They have cheap fees of 0.001-0.002 Algo.

  • Layer 2: L2 contracts are for customized complex contracts. These are computed out-of-band by a parallel "contract execution committee", are stateful, and can take multiple blocks to run. The effects transaction are then batched into a series of L1 contracts and executed together atomically.

• In contrast, any dApp that uses EVM smart contracts has a very low TPS limit (~20 TPS), which is why many newer networks including Algorand have non-EVM optimizations (e.g. AVM).

• Easy to develop: Algorand provides SDKs for developing in , and there are many more community-developed SDKs.

• DeFi adoption: Algorand's . It has been growing steadily even in the bear market, but it's still much smaller than Fantom's $660M, Polygon PoS's $1.7B, and completely unnoticeable next to Ethereum's $40B. It's even smaller than several Polkadot Parachains and Ethereum Layer 2 networks. At least it's bigger than Cardano's TVL, which is almost non-existant.

Transaction Fees

• Transfer fees are 0.001 Algo (currently ~$0.0004), which are incredibly low but also subsidized. Token (ASA) transfers and most L1 smart contracts also cost 0.001-0.002 Algo.

• If Algo changes sufficiently in price, a governance vote can always readjust the fee schedule..

• Transaction fees do not pay for participation or relay nodes. They simply go into a for future community rewards. This is masking the true cost of running the Algorand network.

• Algorand transaction fees only produce about , many magnitudes smaller than the billions of dollars it has paid nodes so far.

Community Governance

• Staking was replaced by community governance voting in Sept 2021. Periodically, the Algorand Foundation will launch a governance vote, during which individual holders can "stake" their Algorand and vote for interest rewards. This provides a strong short-term incentive for investment. These rewards come from a pot of 2.5B Algo dedicated to Participation Rewards. This is a marketing gimmick considering that no other network needs to pay for governance participation.

• Due to how the governance lock-in is designed, there is a disincentive for centralized exchanges to participate. This creates more democracy in voting. For example, Binance dropped their Algo interest rewards after individual users withdrew their funds in mass before the governance voting, taking away all of Binance's governance rewards.

Part 2 - Tokenomics and Long-term Sustainability Issues

The biggest issue with Algorand is that its tokenomics are designed for short-term network growth instead of long-term sustainability. The token dynamics have been changed before, and will almost certainly need to be changed again once the rewards run out.

No Plans after 2030

Algorand Foundation's plans for have been . It originally designed for Algo's 10B supply to be distributed over 6 years, with relay nodes being rewarded until 2022. That plan was to extend the deadline to 2030 with rewards for relay nodes to last until 2024. There are no plans for sustainable rewards past 2030, and Algorand's tokenomics is a ticking time bomb.

High Inflation

The rewards were pre-minted, but there is vesting schedule for those rewards that increases the circulating supply. According to Messari, circulating supply was by 49% in 2021, 20% in 2022, 23% in 2023, before tapering off at 7.5% in 2024 to 2029. That's actually an underestimate because Algorand's token issuance is algorithmic and increases when there is more network activity like in 2021 (accelerated vesting). The silver lining is that accelerated vesting is now over, so inflation will be , assuming the 10B max supply holds.

Current fee structure is Not Sustainable

Algorand only produces , which is barely enough to cover the annual salary of single engineer. If they want to support their current 120 relay nodes, they'll likely need 100x the current fees unless everyone is super nice and working for free. Fat chance. Bandwidth costs aren't cheap either, especially if the network grows and needs multiple 10Gbps sustained connections.

Lack of economic incentives to run nodes

There are 2 main types of nodes: Relay Nodes and Participation Nodes

Relay Nodes are maintained by a consortium of early investors, VCs, Universities, and other non-profits until 2024. These are being paid for through multiple rounds of massive grants totaling at least 2.5B Algo (worth billions of USD). Algorand is still the covering costs for future decentralized Relay Nodes through its .

It currently costs , which actually isn't bad. But that's assuming the engineer running it is doing that freely, and it doesn't account for the much-needed network growth. The $150K in annual transaction fees will only cover the salary for 2 part-time engineers. In other words, if the Algorand network stops paying for ALL other rewards (community rewards, staking, governance, development, participation nodes), it still only makes enough to pay for 2 out of its 120 relay nodes.

What happens when all these groups used to getting paid in rewards gradually see their rewards disappear? Are they still going to stick around? Relay nodes are used to being paid billions of dollars that are eventually going to go to ZERO. Algorand Foundation believes that nodes can run altruistically. If they happen to be correct about that, then they made a colossal blunder by wasting billions of dollars on them in the first place.

Massive Marketing

Algorand's marketing is absolutely massive. Algorand has paid for a FIFA sponsorship and exclusivity, Times Square ads, podcast ads, TD Garden ads, Napster, and much more. However, FIFA is also a technical partnership for NFTs, and Napster is a purchase, so Algorand is also benefitting from these outside of marketing.

I haven't seen any other blockchain spend more on marketing than Algorand. It's a lighter version of Crypto.com's marketing strategy, and we know how that turned out.

Incentive Bait-and-switch Tactics

Algorand Foundation has a record of attracting groups with reward pools that eventually disappear. They attracted node runners (early relay nodes) with billions of dollars of rewards, set to last until 2024. They attracted stakers and participation nodes with rewards to last until 2022. They then attracted community participation with Governance rewards starting in late 2021 that is currently scheduled to run out in 2030. Most networks don't provide any additional economic incentives for governance voting because voting is the incentive. It's just another marketing tactic meant to grow its network.

The subsidized low transaction fees are also a marketing tactic.

The big question is whether a community so used to receiving economic incentives will stick around after those rewards go away. Some might, but will enough remain?

Solutions to Fix the Tokenomics

Algorand's tokenomics is very fixable as long as the community is willing to make big changes. First, the fee sink will need to be adjusted to pay for network security instead of community rewards.

One option is to hope the marketing strategy plays out and the network gets 100x more utility by 2030. There's not single network among the top 50 smart contract blockchains that saw anywhere near that much real activity even at the 2021 peak. This is highly unlikely due to massive competition between all PoS blockchains, and without community rewards, every other network will be more attractive with staking rewards. The other problem with this is that bandwidth and storage requirements will also increase, leading to even higher costs of running nodes, leading to needing even more utility.

Another option is to use tail-emissions along with Ethereum's token burning model. Algorand would need to increase its fee schedule enough to maintain minimum-viable security, which is roughly 100x its current fees. Fortunately fees are so low currently that even with a 100x increase, fees would still be in the pennies range. The problem is that increasing fees so drastically will likely decrease usage activity since Algorand has marketed itself as a low-fee network.

Both of these options still require an end to "max supply". Instead, Algo would have a "total supply" target of 10B Algo. This is because crypto transaction activity is highly-volatile. For consistent security, you need a model that produces consistent fees, not one that is 1000x higher during bull cycles than bear cycles.

Most likely, Algorand will need to apply a mix of both options even though they partially-counteract each other.

Disclaimer: I’ve lifted a lot of this research across multiple platforms and research tools to complete these 10 talking points.

1. Algorand has a strong developer team

One of the key determinants to the long-term success of a crypto project is the quality, and commitment of the developer team. The more active the developer team, the higher the chances of a project’s long-term success. Similarly, a team that is made up of developers, and cryptography experts is a much better pointer to success than one made up primarily of marketers and other non-tech people.

On both of these fronts, Algorand scores highly. The project has one of the most tech savvy team in crypto. For starters, the project founder, Silvio Micali is faculty at the Electrical and Computer Science department at MIT. He is well versed in cryptography, and zero-knowledge proof, among other technologies.

2. Algorand is an interoperable blockchain

Another reason why you should invest is its interoperability. This simply means that anything built on Algorand can easily connect with other blockchains.

Interoperability is a big deal because it is at the heart of blockchain growth and mass adoption. That’s because it is only by blockchains seamlessly connecting with each other that businesses can have an incentive to invest in the tech.

3. Algorand has a growing ecosystem

Algorand has a fast-growing ecosystem of projects building on top of it. Per the project metrics, the number of non-fungible tokens running on top of Algorand stands at 4,626,597. On the other hand, the total fungible tokens on Algorand stand at 3,437.

The number of Fungible tokens has particularly grown exponentially. Just from May to July, the number grew from 708 to 4100.

4. Algorand is available on multiple exchanges

One of the key indicators of a cryptocurrency that has good fundamentals is the type of exchanges where it is listed. One major being Coinbase and user friendly platform being extremely inviting

5. It consensus algorithm guarantees decentralization efficiently

The consensus algorithm used to secure a crypto network matters a lot. Ideally, crypto can either use Proof-of-Work or the many variations of Proof-of-Stake.

Algorand is one of the few projects that have got it right when it comes to Proof-of-Stake. It uses a Pure Proof-of-Stake algorithm that solves the three main problems facing most blockchains. The three problems are decentralization, scalability, and security.

By solving the governance problem that plagues most blockchains, Algorand is among an elite group of cryptos that are primed for adoption. This by default, makes it one of the high potential cryptos to invest in today.

6. Algorand is easy to use

A blockchain is as valuable as the number of people using it. For payment cryptos, the value comes from the people using them for payments. It is for this reason that Bitcoin is so valuable. Besides its low supply, Bitcoin has grown in adoption since its inception.

For platform blockchains, value comes from the number of developers using, or likely to use them in the future. It’s the reason why Ethereum has gained so much value over the years.

Using this metric, Algorand has pretty good prospects going into the future. One of the key advantages of Algorand is that it uses the Python programming language. Python is one of the most popular and easy-to-learn programming languages out there. This means that most developers would not have a hard time building on Algorand.

7. It has a functional wallet

Having a functional wallet is one of the factors that can draw in, or put off, long-term investors from a crypto project.

A functional wallet speaks volumes about the seriousness of a crypto developer team. It is an indicator that they are serious about the project, and that is attractive to investors.

A functional wallet also negates most of the security risks that come with holding crypto. Without a functional wallet, investors are forced to leave their holdings in exchanges, or in wallets that they may not be so sure about it.

8. Algorand is a perfect bridge between CeFi and DeFi

There is a lot of hype around DeFi at the moment. This is evident in the growth in DeFi project valuations, and in the amount of dollars locked in such platforms. However, in reality, DeFi is nowhere close to matching the value of centralized finance. Very few people globally, even those invested in it, understand how DeFi works.

One of the ways that Algorand is acting as a bridge between the two is through partnerships with strategic centralized finance players. Some of the institutions it has partnered with include SWIFT, HSBC, Facebook, and OMFIF.

Besides introducing such institutional players to DeFi, Algorand also offers a comprehensive guide on the development of smart contracts. The platform understands that smart contracts are an integral part of the future of finance, and as such, should be easily understandable to those in centralized financial institutions.

9. Algorand is in the fast-growing NFTs market

The number of NFTs launched on the Algorand blockchain has shot up over the last couple of months. Per the project’s metrics, over 4.5 million NFTs have been launched through the Algorand blockchain.

This is a big deal because NFTs are the next big thing in crypto after DeFi. To understand this, one only needs to look at the level of investment that is going into DeFi.

Recently, top organizations such as Disney, Fox Corporation, Marvel, DC Comics, and Instagram, have all hinted at investments into NFTs. The demand for NFTs is pretty high too if recent sales are anything to by. One of the most expensive NFTs to ever go on sale is Beeple’s, and it sold for $69 million.

As this space grows, blockchains that make it possible to issue NFTs are likely to experience value growth. Algorand is not just a player in this market but has also made it so easy for those looking to issue NFTs.

10. The entire crypto market is in a buy zone

OBVIOUS

I was debating whether to write this or not, just because the timing is warranted, but the situation for all is really sh*tty and I didn't wanna be misunderstood as patronizing. But I think we're at an inflection point with our community and I wanted to provide some context for all of this from my own perspective. This is meant to put things into perspective and give some of us a moment to take a deep breath. This won't be a rah-rah feel good hopeful post because at this point most of you have lost huge amounts in your ASA portfolio and unlike ALGO, most of these sh*t coin ASAs are going to have a hard time coming back from this.

If you don't know me, hi, I'm old. I'm in my mid-forties moving towards fifties. I've had a long solid career in online gaming, live casinos, esports, fintech and got into crypto in May 2017. Our microfinance project decided to build on Algorand back in Mayish 2019 and we run a recently launched mainnet dex and gamefi player platform on Algorand...and we launched the first verified ASA on Algorand to boot. So, I'm just saying, for Algorand specifically, I'm old as F' I've been around and I've been with Algorand from pretty much the start. But before I write a wall of text, genX style, let me just get straight to some points and you can sort it out from there.

THE CURRENT CONTEXT

1. The entirety of crypto is in a massive bear market and we're coming out of a pandemic (kinda), with a massive amount of fiat supply and a war that from some estimates has a 10% chance of escalating into a WW3 with nukes.

2. Meme coins and non Doxxed teams were always going to be speculative. Rugs always happen in Crypto and are worse on other chains - not a justification -again context.

3. DeFi still hasn't figured out how to make things work past 12-18 months.

4. Product needs time to build, an ASA is not a product, a community is not a product, NFT series are not product, a smart contract is not a product.

5. We have lost our way from focusing on decentralization and what that means and seems to be split in everything from DOAs, DeFi, NFT, gamefi

6. We are early to Web3, and maybe the crypto moment is finally passing on -

7. Short term finance never has any crossover to with long term productivity - if you're gonna degen, degen, if you're gonna hold, hodl

8. Most investments are based on narratives that seem to work for them - in that, fundamentally everything is an idea until its is something or agreed upon (gross generalization), but at this point ~ what is Algorand's narrative moving forward? As infrastructure, partners, ASA and community?

9. Founders matter because until it all works, someone's force of will and wanting to see something built is the only thing left when there is no reason to keep going and when you can just rug away into the sunset.

10. Investing is a risk because it needs capital to happen and that can fail. The act of the market is for the efficient allocation of capital to grow something - but if its unlimited, then the lack of constraints to capital just make it a sh*t show of non accountability and misallocation to little punk kids who understand the language of degens and fomo, but little else.

So: I'll address these one-by-one. It will get long. Even though I have 8 urgent tasks I need to get sorted before I get some rest. (A). I will be up all night anyway and I think this is worth me doing it. (B) I haven't posted in a while, so this is overdue anyway - as my community matters and that includes Algorand as whole.

ELABORATIONS:

1. The entirety of crypto is in a massive bear market and we're coming out of a pandemic (kinda), with a massive amount of fiat supply and a war that from some estimates has a 10% chance of escalating into a WW3 with nukes.

Why has our entire crypto space gone bad?

Bears happens, happened in 2017-2019, happened before then from 2013-2016. This too will pass.

Why isn't it continuing to go up?

Markets correct and when there is a lot of growth, we expect there to be revenues and products that increase consumption to reflect that. Once products that are funded now come to market and have a visible impact, things will reprice at that time.

But if you want to understand a market, you look at the main indexes. Your stock went down, but how far in relation to the S&P500. Your ASA sh*t the bed, compare that to how $ALGO is doing. It could be worse, it could relatively ok. Context matters, having single outliers are great, but that is why they are outliers.

What makes this even more difficult is war and how the pandemic continues to play out. This is on top of regulation and the massive amount of new money supply. Instability usually plays well for the crypto narrative. But who knows? no one. But there is no 'buying the dip' right now. If you have cash, you buy what you think is the bottom and just hold. If you have no cash, you either cut your losses, or hold until the market changes.

2. Meme coins and non Doxxed teams were always going to be speculative. Rugs always happen in Crypto and are worse on other chains - not a justification -again context.

First crypto I ever had was DOGE for free from a faucet back in 2014. It was relatively accessible and I have good memories of the 0.12 DOGE I got. But other than visibility and accessibility, you are not investing, you're gambling and its all about musical chairs. You get in and out and in and out before the music stops. This is not investing.

I love being a founder. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. I wanna shout it from the rooftops, I wear it with pride. I am taking that shot and I wanna have that buzzer beater. Why the F' would you be an anonymous founder? Other than Satoshi who had a real possibility of going to prison forever (if you know the context at the time with gov'ts being very anti-independent monetary systems) this anonymous founder sh*t is bullsh*t . Even Do Kwon of Terra Labs, who is now the 2nd largest TVL in crypto is doxxed and has already been served by the SEC. Cause he believes in what he is doing.

At the end of the day, investing in a start-up is 90% gonna fail in what it sets out to do, but a strong team, dedicated founder is gonna pivot and make it work. Is not going to just piss off or rug, because that would follow them the rest of their lives as well. If every major VC on the planet looks at teams as the #1 metric for due diligence, then call it what it is - it's always a degen play with a meme coin and a non-doxxed team. You wanna be degen, be degen, but don't think that these meme coins or non-doxxed teams can be anything but a speculative swing trade.

3. DeFi still hasn't figured out how to make things work past 12-18 months.

This is a hard truth. Maybe Andre Cronje of FTM figured it out and just had to cut loose. You could say, They just rugged the entire Eth and EVM portable DeFi space, but I wouldn't. I'd say, they are regrouping mentally because they came up again a hard place in hell and a hard f'ing meteorite.

Whether it is 3,3,3 or rebase or whatever, the fact is, you can't keep short term incentivizing holders without having real revenue coming in from something other than new buyers. And you can't keep giving out rebasing and staking rewards until the supply can't be managed without a massive crash in value - leading to a massive crash in confidence, leading to run on the reserves, which leaves the project with zero and 10% of the investor's expectations met, or 90% of the investors feeling pisses as F'.

When I got into crypto, I did the first thing any genx old guy would do, I read up on monetary theory, enrolled myself back into school for monetary policy and spent 2 years researching and writing. Now all of that has nothing to do with making money or creating a massive DeFi project with 1B in TVL, but it makes it clear to me that its not completely solved yet. We as an industry are still are working it out and maybe the guys who started it are not the best guys to finish it - just because the short and long term incentives, they don't just bridge over nicely.

Straight up, my team, invested in yieldly. They started and now are getting hammered, and some of their team moved on to other projects, and one of the founder (who left the main team) still advises. But they have done a lot of good in the the ALGO space with real dev. But for long term hodlers - it sucks balls now. Us too, we never sold even 1 YLDY with over 76M in hand. Why? Because we use them for the liquidity pools, because we are looking towards the end game of it all - even if that hasn't been figured out yet. But no one has. Think I'm full of sh*t , all the defi darlings you look at now, revisit it again in 12-18 months. Not cause it's a bad platform, it's just not solved.

Not to put down any defi project, but its in progress. Recognize that, you don't need to like it, you don't need to hold it or support it. but stop with this headless chicken sh*t . And just remember, at least you're not a FTM/ Yearn holder.

4. Products need time to build, an ASA is not a product, a community is not a product, NFT series are not product, a smart contract is not a product.

If you're on Ethereum, just youtube whatever, how build a Dex, collateralized lending, NFT randomizer, find and revised those contracts, deploy, get a sh*t 10k audit and vola, add in a telegram channel, good memes, twitter and discord and you're a product. Oh piss off, you're not product, you're a project ok - and you may have a community, but a product isn't just a front end with a smart contract or a gallery- as a start-up you're doing something new - innovative, or creating access.

Now I love the Algo NFT community. But these are NFT projects ok? I just want to make a clear distinction that yes you invest in them, but you're investing and buying art, not a product that is pushing technological innovation - art innovation - ok I'm not trying to pick a fight here as I am a supporter of ALGO NFTs - but just get my point.

You can't just put up a product over night, we have 5 senior fullstack teal developers and 15 junior ones, and every time Algorand comes out with new functionality and capabilities, we integrate and upgrade our product. You're not going to innovate with 3 months of HTML coding. It isn't going to happen. But are we slower than nearly every other project in coming out to mainnet or new revisions - yes - but is there actually product pushing some type of innovation, yes. So from the time we announce we usually get the deadline wrong 2 or 3 times, and our dev team spends weeks working 18 hour days to get to our deadlines and it takes at least 2-3 weeks for a major functionality to be finished and an alpha platform of at least 8 months.

So if takes longer to do it right and another firm just is going in there with the bare minimum - ok competition is competition, but who do you think is really going to end up on top, the guys who innovated and thought in depth the new value they are bringing in, or the bare minimum? Well, when it comes to a domain you will own forever, i'll give you the answer, it's the guys who coming in with full product depth.

Crypto is backwards, you fomo and shill first, but you can't echo chamber forever, at a certain point, you need to expect that these companies will have to build something in that lull is where the bear market is, and its product which will get us out of it. So again - degen away- but its not a product, its a speculative project.

5. We have lost our way from focusing on decentralization and what that means and seems to be split in everything from DOAs, DeFi, NFT, gamefi

Getting bigger in scope is great, but why are we in this space. I'm here because I believe that the ability to have decentralized structures can act as a way to network those marginalized by centralized structures in an equally powerful way. I believe that Algorand is at the forefront providing a decentralized solution that makes that happen in secure, fast and scalable way - more so that other solutions out there.

But commericaly, the ETH market is 10x bigger that Algorand. But even if we may do multichain or whatever, the commercial side of value is clear, but my focus on why I am in this space is not changing. If you're only in this because of the commercial side, that is fair, but is also fair to say that for you Algorand and crypto is a sh*tty place to be in.

If we are in this for also the reason that we think this is the next great innovation for humanity, then it is something we can still align and support during this bear market and the multitude of failed ASAs and reflect, and do better as a community. Or we can all just wait this through until a 6 months pass and the bull comes back and we learned nothing except that we have newer community of degens while the old ones have moved on.

Come on Algo Fam, remember we are #algofam.

6. We are early to Web3, and maybe the crypto moment is finally passing on -

tokenizing everything, and blockchain supply chain never happened (see IBM blockchain if you can find it lol); DeFi, Play2Earn, Frog nation 3,3,3 - its a hard fall down - but put that with NFT, DAOs and real revenue products - maybe Web3 - the structure of governance and usage through NFTs and DAOs - it is something - I think so, I pivoted 4 years of planning and dev to it, not because I failed, its because I think this is the next step. In this, I'm hopeful. In crypto as just tokens, maybe that age is now just passing into this one.

7. Short term finance never has any crossover to with long term productivity - if you're gonna degen, degen, if you're gonna hold, hodl

No one does their f'ing research, because if you're a degen, you just wanna make a trade and get paid for it and if you're not degen, then you feel like sh*t because you didn't degen and you keep thinking about the gains you're not making, cause in the short term, everyone is a greedy self entitled serving F', it's always the right move in game theory - but its never the right move in building something. But chose either way and own it. Stop whining on twitter about it. Do you really think you did research and that is why you got f'ed on speculative coin or rug pull, no, its cause you degened in or rationalized it and degened in later - just own it and then you can learn from it.

And if you're a long term hodler, then you have my full sympathies, I know it would have been better to sell with the other degens and now you are forced to hodl. But again, just check in once a week, look at some nice Algo NFTs, and if you have done your research on a doxxed team with actual development on a product - then its up to the crypto fates at this point - this is not financial advice as you should do whatever you need to do, DYOR - but be real and own your actions at this point.

8. Most investments are based on narratives that seem to work for them - in that, fundamentally everything is an idea until its is something or agreed upon (gross generalization), but at this point ~ what is Algorand's narrative moving forward? As infrastructure, partners, ASA and community?

I'm sure Sean Lee's departure from the foundation was a bit of a shock for most everyone, but Staci the new Chief officer, seems to have come in like a welcome hammer. But most people have wanted more from Algorand in terms of marketing and announcements. I'd say, marketing and announcements have been plenty, but partnerships aren't big innovative strides. And you won't get big innovative strides without a lot of developers and developer support.

The reality is, our community is still small. The ASA market was still tiny compared to the Eth market that if there is a hack or exploit or rug pull, it still will barely make the mainstream crypto news as it's peanuts in both gains and losses compared to what is out there. Not to belittle the situation, but personally, for losses, they suck - for our community and where Algorand is headed, we still haven't hit the nail on the head yet. BUT, with C3, that may happen with the adoption of 'state proofs' possible on Algorand- and if we get stable cross chain bridges and see massive amount of locked capital move to Algorand - this could be what we really stand for. Things are still happening - lets focus on this technology and make it the narrative, not hyped ASA projects that are rehashing old business models that never worked in web2 let alone web3. I mean we have Silvio Micali, the co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Verifiable Random Functions and many of the protocols that are the foundations of modern cryptography Do you think these sh*t ASA projects are worthy to mentioned in the same breath as him? No. So lets get some perspective, it was never an ASA that was going to rocket Algorand and our community, it was always going to be an equally fantastic innovation to that of the birth of Ethereum or solving the multichain cross chain.

9. Founders matter because until it all works, someone's force of will and wanting to see something built is the only thing left when there is no reason to keep going and when you can just rug away into the sunset.

For a product, you need a product lead. If you do house renovations, you need someone to make the decisions. Cause if it is something easy, ok, we can all just pick and choose similar options that are really just about preference, but when you make a new innovative product that is a new generation or creating a new market or a new solution that solves something web2 unsolvable, it is not easy. Its motherfking hard as hard can be. If you don't have the mental and physical fortitude, the will to encourage your team and keep them on the big picture and get your hands dirty with whatever needs to be done, motherfking hard always wins. And sometimes pride is the only thing pushing founders not to fail.

If I'm gonna be a founder, and call myself one, I also am accepting all the sh*t that is going to be thrown at me as well as the accolades and support that I'll get as well. And I'm also putting myself out there and saying - ok, I got this - and if I don't well I know I'm gonna get smashed here with bird, dog and panda sh*t all over reddit and my twitter feed. But if founders folded so quickly from reddit and twitter and got to run away under a mask, well they were never founder material to begin with - mental and physical health is important - and if you couldn't handle the pressure then you should get out. The issue is putting yourself out there like you were actually gonna see the project through and raised cash - and made a community and then FK'ed off ~ You were never a founder - cause a founder owns their failures too and continues to make it right and bows out after everything that could be done was done. Whenever I get called out - and if it is legit and not a troll, I welcome that someone cared enough to write something out that called me out and it is a chance to address it. And if its a troll - well that is part of the job description that comes as being a founder - cause it is a motherfking hard f'ing thing to do and be. But founders need to be kept honest and accountable too so that it is clear that they did put their all in - and after that, what more can we ask of anyone?

10. Investing is a risk because it needs capital to happen and that can fail. The act of the market is for the efficient allocation of capital to grow something - but if its unlimited, then the lack of constraints to capital just make it a sh*t show of non accountability and misallocation to little punk kids who understand the language of degens and fomo, but little else.

Crypto is 99% optics, 1% product. But when the product comes, it comes with the thunder and the seas parting. We are looking at the cutting edge of our modern society here - alongside AI, genetics, semiconductors, sensors and telecommunication - web3/crypto is at the edge of reshaping our world in the areas of finance, accessibility and ownership.

With all innovation, it isn't the mid-forty's founder leading the charge - it's the 20's something who are native to the existing innovation and can see the next steps. All I can see are the steps, but I'm not native to the world we live in - I was raised in world of rotary phones, half the world excluded to international travel and yearly sets of encyclopedias for knowledge. I used a keyboard to play doom, and used a mouse to play Quake 2, had a Nokia cellphone that would get as hot as the sun after talking 20 mins on it and learned to text by pressing 1-9 multiple times to make a word. I tweet, but it takes me 20 mins to do one tweet etc. I'm barely hanging on here - but that's ok, because the world is in the right hands with every generation that is native to push for something more.

Problem is, that faking it is easier than ever and optic is reality for 99.99% of everyone raised natively in this era. It is why snapchat works, or instagram is huge or tiktok is wreaking it. It's also why it is easy - if you don't give a sh*t about the product- to make optics the product. And while I b*tch about competing with the same empty optics, it is the name of the game. And some projects may have just faked it until they made it ~ but I'm ending with - you as a trader may be screwed right now, but now it's gonna be hard for those projects with just optics to make it, you will expect more, the market is expecting more and out of that, the real projects for products born in this downturn and bear market aren't going to be opportunists but some real founders.

So perspective. You got screwed, and yes there are people to blame, but we are all at some level opportunists and were willing participants in this fall from grace as we stuff ourselves full ~when we thought the APY couldn't ever go down. Sucks bad, but know that the market is moving regardless and whatever time it takes ~ we'll get to a better place because Algorand is all substance and innovation, and we will still need this community to continue to rally behind that.

#AlgoFam the fire is burning away the chaff. See you on the other side.

Sinjin - a Founder who builds on Algorand.

Algorand has moved up to number 17 in the Coin Market Cap list of top cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation. This recent climb may be down to the impending introduction of governance from October the 1st.

What does everyone think about Algorand? and will it continue it's climb up the charts? I'm very bullish on algo but it'd be interesting to hear any dissenting voices as well as from my fellow algo bulls.

Algorand is the first carbon negative blockchain, it has a top quality team working on it, and there are many new apps being built upon it's blockchain.

Best wishes, H.T.

Edit: It's just overtaken Terra Luna in #16, closing in on Litecoin.

Hi people. I'm writing this post because I'm looking to DCA on Algorand, since it's on sale again, and who is better than the cryptocommunity to ask for information?

I'm having a look at charts, and Algo is a bloodbath. It keeps making lower lows, so much that I'm starting to get interested in buying some more. My last buy was at around 0.2 usd, so down 50%. But becore I invest some jard earned money I want to do a better research and I figured to create this post, so that everyone can benefit from the inputs of the community.

So, what do you think are the strengths/weaknesses of Algorand? what makes it stand out from other blockchains? Why would you recommend to buy/not to buy it?

I know it's one of those cryptos that are ISO 20022 compliant, so it's a good start, but is that enough to make a crypto a good investment?

First off, it’s important to have an understanding of tokenomics and what the criteria for good tokenomics would be;

Tokenomics provide a way to assess how a token will be used and possibly provide insights into the potential success of a particular cryptocurrency.

The factors that underpin the makings of a well-developed token are the following:

1. Useful within the ecosystem

2. Resistant to inflation

3. Has the potential and ability to scale

4. High in value

5. Present on exchanges

There’s a common myth that Algorand has bad tokenomics, which seems to have spread pretty much unchallenged within the space due to what is now historical information.

But if we look at each point in turn we can prove that this is not the case.

Point 1. Useful within the ecosystem:

The Algorand token ALGO is used throughout the ecosystem to fund all transactions on the Algorand blockchain. It is vital to and is the root of all transactions, whether that be a payment, the creation of a smart contract, staking, defi, NFT, application- anything- all occurs via Algorands ALGO token. Point 1 then is ✅

Point 2. Resistant to inflation:

This is where most people originally obtained the opinion that Algorand was inflationary. A couple of years ago, there was much less supply in circulation and it is fair to say that inflation was high at that time. But that was a couple of years ago. There will only ever be 10bn Algorand in circulation and as I write this there is already 7.8bn in circulation. So 78% of Algo is already out. So the maximum inflation for this token is now only 22% FOREVER.

If you compare this to some other big projects you can see how good this is.

XRP has 53% in circulation out of 100bn, so that’s 4.3x the total supply of ALGO still yet to hit the market. 43 BILLION tokens! And yet I’ve never heard anyone say XRP has bad tokenomics.

SOL has an unlimited supply. So potentially unlimited inflation.

HBAR has 64% of its 50bn tokens released. Meaning it still has 18bn tokens to go! 1.8x the total supply of ALGO. Its current annual inflation rate is 44%!

Check the stats out for yourselves, you’d be surprised when you compare them.

Point 2 ✅

Point 3. Has the potential and ability to scale:

Algorand as a network is just getting started. They’ve spend the bear market building. Back in November 2021 ALGO had around 1500tps, this is now 10,000tps.

It’s now quantum secure.

Its finality time is up from 3.8 seconds to 3.3 seconds which is pretty unmatched in the industry.

It’s got deals with FIFA, the Bank of Italy, Limewire and lots more besides.

All within the bear market.

It’s just received a $50m investment from DWF labs which will easily fund the foundation until well after this bear market ends

Its founder is Silvio Micali. The OG of crypto. Probably the second most important person in crypto industry history next to Satoshi Nakamoto. Without Silvio’s work there couldn’t have been Bitcoin.

Here’s what Charles Hoskinson had to say about Silvio, Algorand and their team

And he’s also right about market adoption, this hasn’t started for Algorand yet in anywhere near the amount that it will. John Alan Woods, who is undeniably one of the best CTOs in crypto, has recently released ALGOKIT, which gives developers the best user experience in crypto. The Algorand foundation runs training courses for new developers in India, which is one of the biggest markets in the crypto space and is likely to be one of the main hubs for development in the future.

So does Algorand have the potential to scale in future- god yes ✅

Point 4. High in value:

Algorand is one of the top 50 cryptocurrencies in the world with a market cap of $860,000,000 so point 4 ✅

Should it be higher. Yes it should (see point 3)

Why isn’t it higher?

Two things have damaged Algorands price recently. A third party web wallet was hacked. This wasn’t anything to do with the Algo protocol, but it was one of the main wallets used by Algo holders.

At the end of the day though it wasn’t Algorand that was at fault, the blockchain was and is just as secure as ever.

The second thing that damaged the price was Gary Gensler. In the Bittrex case, Gensler accused ALGO of being a security. This was just before he went round naming other tokens like SOL, MATIC and ADA as securities and it certainly had the biggest impact on ALGOs price. People feared that it would be delisted by exchanges and the price would tank.

But we now know from the Ripple case that it depends on how the token was sold as to if it counts as a security, and that tokens sold via exchanges don’t fit that definition. So what do we know about ALGOs sales outside of exchanges? We know that the Algorand Foundation is based in Singapore, and held an ICO in Singapore which excluded US participants So in other words, the exchange sales are fine, non securities, and no exchange will delist ALGO- and the ICO sales were held in a way to specifically stay outside of the jurisdiction of the SEC. So there’s no court case for ALGO pending folks.

This price has been suppressed and some of us believe that it’s been suppressed for a reason.

Point 5. Present on exchanges:

ALGO is available to trade on all major centralised and decentralised exchanges. ✅

The market options for ALGO are just as big as for any other major cryptocurrency.

It’s also being used to bridge to other cryptocurrencies. During the recent PEPE boom, you could avoid huge gas fees by buying PEPE on Algo- which has virtually no gas fees. So you basically got $50 more worth of PEPE just by using Algo to buy it.

In summary, ALGO has brilliant tokenomics. When you see people saying that they don’t, they’re either working off old, now incorrect information, or they just don’t want to hear the truth.

Don’t listen to the fud (which will soon be available below).

Almost every major coin is up in the last 60 days and Algo is down. This is highly concerning. There needs to be a solution.

BTC up 39% in last 60 days ETH up 30% in the last 60 days BNB up 4.2% in the last 60 days ADA up 12% in the last 60 days SOL up 17% in the last 60 days

ALGO down 15% in the last 60 days.

At some point you need to at least move with the market. It’s crazy that at this point we are losing value in a market that is gaining

I’ve been loosely involved in crypto for the past decade and hold BTC and ETH (and now, Algo) - I examined the shitcoins available during the last bullrun, but aside from ETH, did not ultimately conclude that any were worth the “investment” (i.e. trying to time the dumps following the pumps). Mass adoption is something I did not consider remotely possible during the last run... my reasoning at the time: “the average person can barely handle possessing a credit card, let alone figuring out the complexities of purchasing and storing digital assets with long alpha numeric addresses at 8+ digit amounts.” User interfacing and general crypto knowledge have improved significantly now (and therefore, general adoption), some 3 to 4 years later.

This cycle, Algorand has caught my attention. Semi-relatedly, I have been following Cardano (ADA) for the past few months, but the lack of working smart contracts, coupled with the founder’s eccentricism and overall demeanor, have kept me from investing. Coming from a mathematical background myself, I do appreciate the focus of ADA’s development; but I worry about the missed deadlines and the ‘never-ending (and potentially unwarranted) ADA optimism baked with subtle pessimism for other projects that Charles portrays in seemingly every interview I watch or statement I read.

This leads me to my question: why is everyone sleeping on Algorand (ALGO)? Algo does, currently, almost everything that ADA claims it will do (and that ETH hopes it will do, should the open-heart-network-surgery being planned in the roll-out out EIP-1559 and Eth2.0). I am not here to shill - I am simply curious. Algo functions on pure proof of stake (PPoS), has working smart contracts, has a secure native wallet, features lightning fast transaction times (that will only improve) and low transaction fees, and has a smaller final circulating supply. The staking rewards system is great now (yes, it is an inflationary distribution - but, so what? This argument could be made about any coin that has not yet hit its full circulating supply, whether by PoS or PoW). Even Charles has stated that Algo is the real contender for (fully functioning) ADA (and again, ADA is not fully functioning as of yet). Algo was created by Silvio Micali and team (both Silvio and another of the team members won the Turing Award in 2012 for their work in cryptology, and Silvio has been publishing work on blockchain technology since the 80s).

I believe that true crypto adoption will come by means of USDC and government adoption (whether we like it or not), and I think Algorand is poised to be the network that facilitates this adoption (look up the USDC/Algorand relationship as it stands now, already).

Am I alone here? How do you all feel about Algo?

EDIT: Appreciate all of the spirited discussion. I think it might be time to buy some more algo

As many of you I noticed a raising number of posts worrying about Algorand especially its price and in comparison to Avalanche and Solana. Avax and Sol indeed did what many Algonauts hoped Algorand would do. They mooned.

We all agreed Algorand wouldn't be hyped and it was mostly a long term investment with astonishing fundamentals. Would you even doubt Algorand for a second if it would currently sit at 3$? Probably not but people seem to be fuding caused by short term price movements and the current bearish trend. There will always be coins outperforming Algorand especially in short time frames.

Avalanche and Solana are both EVM compatible so of course they're getting a short term massive boost and a fast developing defi space. Nevertheless they still have weaknesses like raising fees and downtimes. Algorand hasn't. Algorand hasn't gone any shortcuts. Algorand was build from scratch. Of course it has its cons but the underlying tech and the AVM are truly amazing.

Our defi space is easy to enter, easy to use, fast and cheap. We have some truly awesome dapps Like Yieldly , Tinyman, Algofi, Algomint and when comparing Algorand 6 months ago and nowadays we did some big steps in the right direction. There will be a lot to do but I wouldn't swap Algorand for any other project. It's just price. Maybe we'll zoom out in 2-3 years and this dip might be just a tiny dip.

If you're running behind hypes you will be late to every party. Once its hyped the big gains are made. Remember last summer when we were called the best Stablecoin. Shortly afterwards we've spiked to 2.5$. If you believe in Algorand long term this is just a dip to buy if you have real concerns you might diversify your portfolio.

What I wanted to say in short: Why you are concerned now when you were euphoric 3 months ago? Just because of price. Our ecosystem developed and we got good news and an awesome Decipher Event

Edit: Just a few things that happened this year. CBDC of Marshall Islands, El Salvador, Columbia, the 4 bulls, decipher, Yieldly, Algofi, Tinyman, Algomint, State Proofs anouncment, 800+ companies building, 16 million wallets, governance, AVM updates

Edit2: Thanks for all the awards and positive Feedback. I'm literally overwhelmed and at work but I appreciate every single response , upvote and reward

I know I know, most of you will say yes since I am on the Algorand Reddit page. But I wanted to post this on this page because I would think out of the other crypto pages this one would be the people with the most knowledge related to Algorand.

What sets Algorand apart from other coins like ETH, SOL, etc.

ETH has L2s which makes it just as fast, in the near future quantum computing security will also be implemented and I’m assuming other projects will also implement it.

SOL also fast, and will most likely implement the same security as well.

So if these other two coins for example do these things, why should I buy Algorand? I’m genuinely asking because I don’t hold Algorand in my portfolio but currently in my opinion it has one of the best technology out there so I have been highly thinking about putting money into it, the only reason I haven’t done so yet is because it seems like coins like ETH, SOL, etc. Will improve and will implement features similar to Algorand, so I am curious what is something that Algorand has that will set them apart for the foreseeable future from the other top players?

UPDATE: bought some Algorand. Tech is solid, leadership is solid, risks are ETH could improve and implement features that Algo has, but it seems like Algo is everything ETH wants to be, and that is a strong indication that this is a worthwhile investment and worth being along in the ride for. Still hold ETH, but doesn’t hurt to put some gains into Algo now that their tokenomics problem is gone which was the main factor that affected their price. Now their next hurdle is getting developers to develop in their platform, and users to join. Easier said than done, but if the leadership team is as solid as I think they are then they should be able to pull it off.

Genuine question.