# Algorand

## What is it?

Autonomous, decentralized blockchain network.
Built for the financial future.
World's first pure proof-of-stake (PoS) fundamental blockchain.
Provides a collection of high-performance layer 1 blockchains that offer security, scalability, privacy and transaction finality.

Silvio launched Algorand in 2017 with the primary goal of overseeing significant research projects in theory, security and crypto finance.

The Algorand blockchain is managed by the Algorand Foundation
available to any company or individual that wants to use it.

Performance, interoperability and scaling as well as layer-2 smart contracts and private and public models are at the forefront of Algorand's technical innovation development.

## People behind
Founder: **Silvio Micali**, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is renowned for being one of the top technical schools in the world.

## What makes Algorand Special?
Algorand aims to solve the “blockchain trilemma,” addressing the three major issues that the ecosystem now faces: scalability, speed, and security.

### How?

1. Algorand’s pure proof-of-stake protocol

used to reach decentralized consensus
outperforms preceding blockchain protocols
PPoS is designed to avoid the issue of the "rich growing richer."
In essence, whereas PoS pays miners with the highest stake, PPoS selects miners at random, regardless of their investment in the system.

2. Byzantine agreement (BA) protocol

PPoS is paired with a Byzantine agreement (BA) protocol, the mechanism determines how people can join in the decentralized network, disincentivizes fraudulent activity and produces a single source of truth that can be verified.
use of verifiable random functions (VRFs) to randomly choose users in a private and non- interactive manner is a fundamental method that makes BA suitable for Algorand. VRF is a public-key pseudorandom function that generates proof that its outputs are accurate

The agreed-upon block is then confirmed and transmitted via the network using various digital signatures from the proper verifiers. Because only one block can have the required threshold of committee votes on Algorand, two blocks can never be added to the chain at the same time. This means that in a properly decentralized network, all transactions are completed within seconds, assuring speed.

## News
FIFA announced its cooperation with Algorand towards the beginning of May, designating the network as FIFA’s official blockchain platform and announcing the availability of an official blockchain-powered wallet solution. The Q2 bull run, however, was short-lived. And, by mid-May, the market had crashed and ALGO was trading at $ 0.36.

## Opinions

The team behind Algorand has managed to create a decentralized, highly secure, scalable network while also building a network with some of the lowest fees among any decentralized layer-1 protocol.

Algorand reached the status of not only being carbon neutral but took it to the next level and became carbon-negative in 2021, which is a truly impressive feat. 

Part of Algorand’s success regarding rapidly increasing developer activity is due to developers being able to build on the network using the Python coding language. Python is one of the most popular and well known coding languages used for many projects outside of the blockchain, which opens the door for global developer adoption and collaboration. 

Algorand is outperforming Ethereum in terms of scalability and speed. Ethereum merge did not increase the capacity of the network. Therefore, it did not increase the throughput or scalability of the blockchain. Ethereum’s TPS is currently in the 10-35 range. However, Algorand just achieved 6000 TPS on its blockchain. Not only does this outperforms Ethereum, but it also beats Mastercard’s 5000 TPS.