The brainchild of cryptography pioneer and Turing award winner Silvio Micali, Algorand, is an open-source software company building technical innovation for the borderless economy. Supported by an outstanding team, and backed by solid engineering and cryptographic principles, it is ready to take over the smart contract ecosystem.
Why is Algorand ideal for developers?
Some key properties make Algorand perfect for developer use:
- Low computational requirements: First and foremost, Algorand runs on pure proof-of-stake. As such, it is very resource-friendly and doesn’t need energy-consuming mining farms.
- High Scalability Potential: The entire Algorand community can confirm blocks and transactions with latency on the order of a minute while scaling to many users.
- Low Fork Probability: The Algorand chain has a very low probability of forking. Even if there is temporary dissension within the network, Algorand makes used that no users have different views of a confirmed transaction.
- Randomization: Since the proposers and committees are randomly selected, the network isn’t controlled by a few miners or validator set.
- Governance: Community token holders can change protocols.
Attracting the Developers
Let’s face it. Developers are the lifeblood of a decentralized network. It doesn’t matter how fancy your platform is, at the end of the day, you need to attract developers to your network. Developers can code in the Algorand mainnet by using the REST APIs. The team has also released open-source Go, Javascript and Java SDKs and more will be added over time.
The best part of Algorand’s pure POS system is that it allows for the creation of a network that is both fast and decentralized. Pure POS will enable people to participate in a decentralized network while preventing forged identities at the same time. Pure POS means that anyone who wants to participate in the consensus protocol can do so by flagging an account with the ALGO tokens instead of locking it up. “Pure” means that validators can come and go as they please as their ALGOs are not locked up or “bonded” for any period of time like other proof-of-stake systems.
Holding Hackathons
Another exciting initiative that Algorand is taking to build a vibrant developer community is hackathons. They regularly hold meetups and events with those looking to learn more about blockchain, understand what is possible with Algorand technology, or even build their business on Algorand. There are a couple of events coming up that are attracting a lot of developer interest.
#1 Silicon Valley Code Camp
Location: San Francisco, US
Date: October 19, 2019
Code Camp is a community event where developers learn from fellow developers. Algorand's Russ Fustino will be covering the basics of how the Algorand protocol works, managing a node with the command line tools, showing devs how to integrate using the SDKs to build Layer-2 applications and more.
#2 Conference: First Business Applications Built on Algorand
Location: Rome, Italy
Date: November 6, 2019
This conference will show the participants how leading gained a competitive advantage and even created new industries by building on top of the Algorand platform.
Conclusion
Algorand is backed by some leading cryptocurrency and tech funds, including Metastable, Sparkpool, MultiCoin Capital, AlgoCapital, or even NGC. By incorporating ingenious scalability innovations, Algorand has created a perfect platform to build large-scale dApps. IDEX, Ethereum’s biggest decentralized exchange, will use Algorand to create solutions that provide full finality, tokenization of assets, and programmatic transfers at the Layer-1 level itself.
Algorand has been attracting several businesses to its platform lately because of the sheer potential of its platform. Real estate startup AssetBlock had partnered with Algorand to launch a $60M Real Estate Investment Platform.
If you are a developer then Algorand should at the top of your list as platforms to potentially experiment on.