Algorand’s TestNet is Now Open to the Public

Paul Riegle
Algorand
Published in
3 min readApr 16, 2019

The Algorand team is excited to announce that we’re opening our TestNet to the public at large. Our community continues to grow and influence the future of blockchain and we’re inviting you — businesses, developers, and users — to engage with our platform.

Opening up our TestNet is a major milestone for our team as we approach the launch of our MainNet and we hope you’ll be part of the journey as we learn and grow.

Up until now, access to TestNet has been limited to several hundred participants providing early feedback and validation. After an overwhelmingly positive response to this initial phase, and now that we’ve released our Go, JavaScript and Java SDKs, we’re excited to open up access to our TestNet binaries so developers can access everything they need to get up and running. Anyone can download and install a node — visit our developer site for more information about how to get started.

Our TestNet has a strong core foundation and we’re continuing to work on improving performance, scale and speed every day. To that end, we’re inviting businesses, developers, and users to start building on the Algorand blockchain in hopes that you will share your feedback with us so we can continue to evolve our platform to be at the forefront of global blockchain technology. Opening the TestNet more widely also allows us to identify features that our ecosystem wants, which will help influence what our future roadmap looks like in a positive way.

While the TestNet REST APIs accommodate any language, the Go, Java and JavaScript SDKs simplify additional task-based functions and enable developers who don’t necessarily have experience with blockchain to interact with Algorand’s blockchain in their preferred programming language. We will continue to build out additional SDKs over time.

We’re also excited to let you know that we’ve open sourced all of our SDKs, so developers can continue to iterate and make improvements. This is part of our overall mission to enable our ecosystem to collaborate and innovate, which is why Algorand’s core protocol will also be open sourced in the near future — stay tuned.

We’re really excited about opening up our TestNet, but we’re just getting started. There’s a lot more innovation to come as we prepare to launch MainNet in the near future.

As the Algorand team works on delivering that innovation and growing the company, we want you — our community members — to be an integral part of our platform. Here’s how you can get involved.

  • Start by learning what’s possible with Algorand and the platform’s basic functionality.
  • Visit the Algorand developer site to get started and access our official documentation.
  • Join the Algorand discourse community to meet other community members and be a part of the conversation.
  • Participate by building new products, helping improve the protocol, creating apps that leverage the power of blockchain, and influencing the Algorand roadmap.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you as you get involved with TestNet. Stay tuned for more updates on the development of our platform, MainNet updates, and our company via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

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