Algorand’s integration of ingenious cryptographic mechanisms such as the pure proof-of-stake algorithm has earned it a lot of admirers in the crypto space. Conceptualized by Turing award winner Silvio Micali, Algorand has become one of the hottest smart contract platforms out there, attracting several partnerships and collaborations like IDEX, AssetBlock, Reach, etc.

However, along with these high-profile partnerships, another thing that has attracted a great deal of attention is their openness to their community. Time and again, Algorand has shown that they are willing to listen to their community and incorporate feedback when required. Eg. They listened to the community and executed an EIP to put a pause on relay node rewards.

Seeing how critical their community is to the project, Algorand has been organizing regular meetups to ensure project transparency and improve prospects of the borderless economy.

Algorand - Organizing meetups

Recently, Algorand held the second national e-meet on November 16, 2019, with Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf delivering the principal note address. The event was held at 399 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Along with this, the following events are also scheduled:

November 20, 2019: Elizabeth Baran, Product Management Director at Algorand, will provide an overview of the project and talk about its newest features and tools for developers to build decentralized applications on the blockchain.

November 21, 2019: An event headlined - "Why the Insurance Industry Will Never be the Same" - hosted by John H. and Mike W.

December 04, 2019: There will be a workshop on Cyber Technology for National Security at MIT Lincoln Laboratory Lexington, MA.

What is Algorand?

Algorand is an open-source software company building technical innovation for the borderless economy. The features of its platforms are as follows:

A first-of-its-kind permissionless and pure proof-of-stake (POS) protocol. This ensures a high degree of scalability, open participation, and transaction finality.

Offers secure and cheap transactions which charge a minimum of 0.001 ALGOs per transaction.

Provides an affordable cross-border payment solution that allows users to create multiple transactions in advance.

Along with the features mentioned above, Algorand also brings in a function similar to post-dated cheques. Standard crypto transactions are usually one and done deals. However, Algorand users can generate a vesting schedule by creating signed transactions in advance. This is how it works:

The payer creates several signed transactions with different block periods before sending it over to the payee.

As soon as one of the block periods becomes valid, the payee broadcasts the transaction.

Because of this, the payee receives the payment in a timely fashion.

This vesting schedule will allow banks and financial institutions to issue loans with scheduled repayment workflows.

Conclusion - Pulling in the accolades

Weiss Crypto Ratings recently ranked Algorand very highly. According to them, Algorand’s pure POS algorithm has more liveness and safety than Ethereum. Liveness and safety are the two most important security properties of consensus algorithms. Because of little technical touches and attention-to-details like these, Algorand has ended up garnering a lot of attention. More and more companies and institutions are looking to partner up with the project and use its underlying technology.