Algorand (ALGO) Wallet

What is Algorand?

Algorand is an open source blockchain designed by cryptography pioneer, Turing Award winner and MIT professor Silvio Micali that is focused on mainstream adoption. The foundational, public and permissionless pure proof-of-stake protocol was the first of its kind. It launched in June of 2019. The consensus mechanism ensures full participation, protection, and speed within a truly decentralized network. With blocks finalized in seconds, Algorand’s transaction throughput is on par with large payment and financial networks.

How does it work?

Algorand uses a pure proof-of-stake (PPoS) consensus protocol built on Byzantine agreement. This means the system can achieve consensus without a central authority and tolerate malicious users as long as a supermajority of the stake is in non-malicious hands. The users’ influence on the choice of a new block is proportional to their stake in the system (number of algos, the native currency of Algorand). Users are randomly and secretly selected to both propose blocks and vote on block proposals. All online users have the chance to be selected to propose and to vote. The likelihood that a user will be chosen is directly proportional to its stake.

What does it aim to solve?

The world has a significant problem with financial inequality. There are more than 2.2 billion financially underserved adults in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Monopolies across industries fail to keep data safe. Centralized financial systems have not provided for the free and equal exchange of value (in other words, money), with financial intermediaries driving up transaction costs and time. Ultimately, in a centralized economy, financial opportunity for most people is inhibited by a lack of transparency, accountability and access. A functioning, decentralized economy breaks down these barriers and offers everyone an opportunity to participate in prosperity. The Algorand blockchain offers the ideal foundation upon which to build this borderless economy, as it is truly decentralized, secure and scalable, something that has not been possible for existing platforms to date. The core mission of the protocol is to eliminate the technical barriers that have made it impossible for blockchain to fulfill these economic promises.

What are the features of Algorand?

The network has provided performance of 1000+ transactions per second and less than five second latency. It is also the first blockchain to provide immediate transaction finality with no forking. Algorand will continue to build upon its protocol with several planned advancements:

• Self-Validating Transactions allow for the separation of consensus and storage to enhance the efficiency and logical structure of the Algorand blockchain. This technical advancement provides speed, light incentives, sustainable rewards, and more.
• Vault is a blockchain compression technology that allows new users to immediately join and participate in the Algorand network without a burdensome download, allowing for efficient onboarding, chain growth, and info retrieval.
• Pixel is a new digital signature scheme built for proof-of-stake systems that reduces space requirements through committee member signature aggregation while maintaining forward-security through key rotation.
• Atomic Swaps leverage Algorand’s instant transaction finality and implement same-chain swaps of assets, without any type of time-or hash-locks, in a single transaction. This allows for instantaneous single transactions, removes the need for time locks, and advances the technology toward next generation trading.
• Post-and-sale trade technology allows any seller to post assets for sale, at a given price, which eliminates ambiguity, “double trades,” and customer acquisition costs.
• Smart contracts that leverage Algorand’s consensus mechanism to offer faster and cheaper forms of contracts that require minimal resources, maintain the same high security standards, and drive towards the next-generation of data processing.