Algorand Review

Algorand Review

Many big cryptocurrency exchanges at the same are not that common for a newly-listed coin. Yet, Algorand was listed on Binance, KuCoin, CoinEx, and other exchanges. Algorand token sale has accumulated more than $60 million. Let’s take a closer look at Algorand and try to answer the question: «Is Algorand a good coin?»


What is Algorand?

Algorand is a decentralized, permissionless public blockchain. To aim of the project is enabling a borderless economy by creating advanced blockchain platform.

Algorand development philosophy is based on building a blockchain, that provides a sustainable and boundless opportunity for all. The core principles of the development are the performance, direct usage and adoption, instant verifiability, and simplicity.

Algorand is designed to solve one of the major blockchain challenges. Namely, building fast and scalable cryptocurrency without trading off decentralization. The importance of scalability is exceptionally high for the further adoption of blockchain technology. Ethereum, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, can process approximately 20 transactions per second. Bitcoin is even slower, being limited to 7 TPS. The real-world economy demands higher throughput.

But scalability should not come at the cost of decentralization and security. Maintaining decentralization is vital for network security. Basically, the balance between security, scalability, and decentralization (also known as Blockchain Trilemma) is what Algorand is meant to solve.

Apart from that, Algorand minimizes the computational cost of blockchain participation, which means low transaction fees.

To put it simply, Algorand is scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain with low transaction fees.

Best exchanges to buy Algorand (ALGO): 

  1. Binance Exchange 
  2. CoinEx Exchgane

The concept is good, yet there are several other blockchains with goals, similar to Algorand’s. For example, Zilliqa, Cardano, and QuarkChain.


Team

Algorand team is really strong for the blockchain space. Algorand was founded by MIT professor Silvio Micali. Algorand team is medium-sized, with a significant number of scientists and researchers. The main location for Algorand is Boston.

Apart from the core team, the is the Algorand Foundation. The Foundation is the governance and research organization encouraging participation, development, and innovation on the Algorand platform.

Let’s take a look at some of Algorand team members.

Silvio Micali, Algorand Founder, the world-class expert in cryptography, secure protocols, and pseudo-random generation. Silvio’s cryptography contribution is huge. He is the co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Verifiable Random Functions, and other protocols. At Algorand, Silvio oversees all research, security, and crypto finance.

Steve Kokinos, CEO. Steve is an experienced entrepreneur. Before Algorand, Steve was the CEO of Fuze, global enterprise communications platform.

W. Sean Ford, COO. Before Algorand, he was the CMO at LogMeIn. Another Sean’s executive roles included CMO and COO of Zmags, CMO of Syncsort, and others.

Keli Callaghan, Head of Marketing. Previously, Keli had a position at Avid, where she had a wast set of responsibilities, including global customer engagement strategies, field marketing teams, and the collaborative marketing partnership with Microsoft.

Sergey Gorbunov, Head of Cryptography. Sergey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. His research interests range from foundational cryptography to design of secure large scale systems, computer networks, protocols, and blockchains. His prize-winning dissertation was on building advanced cryptographic protocols using lattice-based cryptography.

 

Communication

The team maintains quite good social media activity. The Algorand main social media channels are Twitter (8k followers), Facebook, and Telegram. Apart from that, Algoram can be found on LinkedIn, Medium, and other platforms. The Algorand Foundation has own social media accounts.

The Algorand team provides a significant amount of technical content to learn more about the project overall or some specific aspects of the technology.

Algorand is backed up by several venture capital firms, including Pillar, 11-11 Ventures, and Union Square Ventures. Union Square Ventures is a well-known VC firm, with the HQ in New York City.

One of the recent Algorand partnerships is the one with Flipside Crypto. The aim of this partnership is creating an advanced toolset for DApp analytics.


Product

The Algorand blockchain network has its own native token ALGO. ALGO token is traded on multiple exchanges, including Binance, KuCoin, and CoinEx.

Recently, the Algorand team made the Algorand source-code available. This allows everyone to see the Algorand code (which is quite well-written, by the way).

Algorand consensus protocol is unique. It is called Pure Proof-Of-Stake (PPoS). The system can achieve consensus without a central authority and tolerate malicious actors as long as major part of the stake is not malicious. Each user’s influence on the choice of a new block is proportional to a stake (number of ALGO tokens).

The advantages of PPoS are decentralization, low energy consumption, and speed. PPoS is considered to be more decentralized and secure than DPoS as there is no mechanism to delegate the universal voting power to a limited set of users. PPoS randomly selects a small set of block verifiers. Apart from that, Algorand blockchain never forks, which makes it more fast and stable.

Advanced PPoS protocol is aimed to turn Algorand into the medium of exchange. Like Bitcoin, but far more scalable.   

The Algorand network has two types of nodes to optimize decentralization and high transaction throughput simultaneously. Relay nodes allow making the network more effective. These nodes are both diverse and decentralized to achieve high security. Participation nodes are for voting.

Algorand security is put among the highest priorities. Algorand security is designed to be excellent on both consensus and network levels.

The consensus protocol is designed to be secure from the malicious action by making the selection of users to participate in the certification of blocks random and secret. The next validator is not known until the next block is generated. Once generated, a block secures the information it contains. The next step and round of the protocol, another set of participants will again be privately and individually chosen. Participants change every step and round of block selection in order to protect the network against attackers.

One of the mechanisms to achieve network security is ensuring that Algorand’s blockchain never forks. It prevents potential attacks on the network.

Algorand has another interesting upcoming tech solutions. One of them is self-validating transactions technology that aimed to achieve a clean separation between consensus and storage.

Algorand users may check if the payments are valid by constantly maintaining the balance of each public key in the system.


Algorand Summary

  • Blockchain platform with the focus on the scalability, security, and decentralization.
  • Highly-skilled team.
  • Algorand utilizes PPoS consensus algorithm.
  • Security on all levels.
  • Good level of technical information delivery.
  • Backed up by solid VC firms.
  • Partnership with Flipside Crypto.
  • Growing community.


Conclusion and Algorand Rating

At first glance, Algorand looks like just another blockchain with advanced scalability, decentralization, security, and low transaction fees. And just that is already good. We believe, Algorand might be bigger than that.

There are many blockchain projects, that can be viewed as Algorand competitors. However, Algorand has a professional team, known investors, and great technology. Moreover, Algorand has strong scientific fundamentals. Algorand looks like a notable blockchain project with the potential to come up with groundbreaking tech solutions. But only time will tell would the team be able to bring these solutions into life. The best exchanges to buy Algorand are Binance, KuCoin, and CoinEx


ConceptTeamCommunicationProductOverall
8.18.77.57.88.0

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