Powered by Consensus

Funding a scalable, secure and decentralized digital currency and transactions platform

The blockchain was intended to provide a rapid, safe and secure way of scaling transactions. Until now, we’ve had to settle for tradeoffs.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Algorand has the potential to attain all three goals.

Algorand’s Open Source Consensus Protocol

Today we’re sharing the news that Algorand is building a scalable, secure and decentralized digital currency and transactions platform.

Our open source protocol is positioned to address the blockchain’s scaling challenges through rapid and efficient user consensus, enabling even the smallest transactions, regardless of transaction volume or number of users. The project is both computationally and energy efficient, and does not require solving cryptographic puzzles, keeping costs low. Transactions will be confirmed within seconds, and transferred value will immediately be available.

Team

Silvio Micali, a Turing award-winning cryptographer and MIT professor of computer science, co-authored the Algorand protocol. Micali is one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs, and is best known for some of his fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer and secure multiparty computation. We’ve grown to 10 people, headquartered in Boston, and plan to share announcements about our core team and advisors in the coming weeks — stay tuned.

Funding

Today we’re also announcing that we’ve raised a $4M seed financing from Pillar and Union Square Ventures to continue to expand our team and develop the open source Algorand consensus protocol. We believe this is a strong signal that Algorand is positioned to solve the blockchain trilemma, and are focused on launching our project this year.

What’s Next

We’re cryptographically committed to developing our roadmap, and our unique governance protocol will allow the system to evolve and meet the future needs of the community, whether those changes are technical or monetary, without hard forks.

Equally important is our commitment to developing our community. Just as the strength of the Algorand network comes from the diversity of its participants, the strength of the Algorand community comes from the diversity of its contributors. We are an open community bringing together end users, developers, and researchers in cryptography, economics, and computer science. If you’re interested in joining our community, reach out to us here.