This is NOT financial advice! This is for educational purposes only! ^{never thought i'd ever get to say that}

Algorand History

Algorand was founded in 2017 by MIT Professor, computer scientist, reincarnation of christ, Silvio Micali. He's been in the cryptography game for a long time and is known for

• Blum-Micali Algorithm
• Goldwasser-Micali Cryptosystem
• GMR Algorithm
• Zero knowledge proofs
• Claw-free permutation
• Psuedorandom Functions
• Peppercoin
• Algorand
• Semantic Security
• Verifiable secret sharing

that's quite a list.

In June 2019 the Algorand Foundation launched the mainnet and announced the first token sale. Algorand was the first blockchain to provide instant transaction finality!

The Algorand team consists of more brilliant people including

• Steve Kokinos, CEO -- 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 -- Had a collaborative marketing partnership with Microsoft nd other roles

and probably many more.

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Peppercoin

Now this doesn't have much to do with Algorand itself but this was something I stumbled upon.

Peppercoin is a cryptographic system for processing micropayments. Peppercoin Inc. was a company that offers services based on the peppercoin method.

The peppercoin system was developed by Silvio Micali and Ron Rivest and first presented at the RSA Conference in 2002[1] (although it had not yet been named.) The core idea is to bill one randomly selected transaction a lump sum of money rather than bill each transaction a small amount. It uses "universal aggregation", which means that it aggregates transactions over users, merchants as well as payment service providers. The random selection is cryptographically secure—it cannot be influenced by any of the parties. It is claimed to reduce the transaction cost per dollar from 27 cents to "well below 10 cents."[2]

Peppercoin, Inc. was a privately held company founded in late 2001 by Micali and Rivest based in Waltham, MA. It has secured about $15M in venture capital in two rounds of funding.[3][4] Its services have seen modest adoption.[5][6] Peppercoin collects 5-9% of transaction cost from the merchant.[7] Peppercoin, Inc. was bought out in 2007 by Chockstone for an undisclosed amount.[4]

Why choose Algorand?

Algorand's mission is to create a borderless economy through a permissionless blockchain.

The Algorand protocol is designed for speed & decentralization. The developers have been able to to finalize blocks in just one round of voting. This means that transactions are finalized instantly and that the Algorand blockchain can handle 1000 transactions with a latency of 5 seconds.

Algorand uses a form of the Byzantine Agreement (Pure Proof of Stake) for their consensus. This means that if more than 2/3 of the network is honest then the network will be secure. Participants do not need to be synchronized on the Algorand blockchain in order to keep the blockchain secure. This way the protocol can stay safe during network partitions without an end in sight. This near-instant recovery from partitions makes it expensive for an attacker to stall the network since the attacker would need to frequently pay the cost for disrupting the network.

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Algorand Consensus Mechanism

On top of that, the Algorand blockchain doesn't fork which ensures it is always fast and stable.

The Algorand blockchain has two sets of nodes to achieve their high transaction throughput

• Relay Nodes -- Relay nodes are where other nodes can connect to, as a relay node you need to be able to handle a large number of connections at a time. You are the "connecting point" for other nodes.
• Participation nodes -- A participation node participates in the Algorand Consensus protocol, participation nodes are eligible and available to be selected to propose blocks to the blockchain.

To keep up with a large amount of nodes, Algorand has developed their own mechanism based on VRF (Verifiable Random Functions, ^{Chainlink brings VRF to ETH!}). This solution allows a participant to check privately and see if they have been selected to participate in agreement for the next block, and then include proof of selection in their network messages.

The Algorand protocol doesn't require users to keep anything secret other than their private keys, this allows for re-choosing participants very quick as users don't have to do anything.

Ecosystem

The Algorand ecosystem is still very small but there have recently been a bunch of projects popping up that are working on Algorand, some of these are:

• Yieldly -- Algorand's first DeFi suite
• Lofty.ai -- Tokenized real estate(they send NFT's as proof of ownership on Algorand)
• Tinyman -- DEX & AMM currently in testnet
• Algobank -- Lending & borrowing on Algorand, in development

Here are some more participants in the Algorand ecosystem

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Tokenomics

A lot of people have been criticizing Algorand's tokenomics. They did a large VC sale at the beginning of the project and for a while this surpressed the price of Algorand as everytime the coin pumped there'd be massive sell offs. Since then they have changed their vesting model & even set up a $300M fund for DeFi applications.

Other than that, currently most people hold Algorand to stake and get a 5% APY automatically. With the limited amount of applications on Algorand not many ALGO is getting used in transactions.

General Stats (data is accurate as per writing this post)

• Price (USD): $2.41
• Marketcap (USD): $12,619,507,700
• Circulating supply: 5,232,848,288
• Total supply: 5,771,636,648
• Max supply: 10,000,000,000

The difference between circulating and total supply means that there is Algo locked up for a period of time. These Algo's are in "circulation" but cannot be used/sold/accessed as they are locked (e.x VC's had their tokens locked for X amount of time)

Read more about tokenomics here: Algorand Economic Evolution Report

Sources

Ofcourse I don't know all of this of the top of my head!

• https://algorand.foundation/
• https://guarda.com/academy/crypto/what-is-algorand-review
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Micali
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercoin
• https://www.coinbureau.com/review/algorand-algo/
• https://www.undervalued.top/cryptocurrency-reviews/algorand-review
• https://reviewmr.com/algorand-review/
• https://cryptoandfire.com/algorand-review/
• https://exchangesoftware.info/algorand-review-algo-worth-it-everythin-you-need-to-know/
• https://developer.algorand.org/docs/run-a-node/setup/types/
• https://developer.algorand.org/docs/run-a-node/participate/