Now that Algorand’s MainNet has launched — What’s Next?
Yesterday, the Algorand Foundation held its inaugural Algo auction, marking the official launch of Algorand MainNet. The inaugural Algo auction was met with overwhelming demand and distributed the first 25 million Algos to global auction participants, marking the start of the borderless economy.
The launch of MainNet and the successful first auction usher in a new era of global economics. The Algorand Foundation’s innovative economic model paves the way for widespread blockchain adoption and realizing the potential of the borderless economy: an inclusive and transparent system, where everyone has the opportunity to build prosperity, no matter where they are.
Throughout our recently completed TestNet phase, companies across industries from finance to commercial real estate have been building innovative applications on the platform. Now that our first auction is complete and MainNet has launched, those companies can bring their Algorand based solutions to market.
Designed by Turing Award winner Silvio Micali together with some of the world’s best minds in cryptography and distributed systems, the Algorand blockchain is the first of its kind — a decentralized, scalable, and secure public blockchain that overcomes the famous blockchain trilemma. While other projects have been forced to make compromises with regard to decentralization and scalability, Algorand has overcome the seemingly intractable barriers that have undermined industry growth and prevented mainstream adoption for nearly a decade.
Algorand’s pure proof-of-stake protocol uniquely finalizes transactions immediately, which means once a block appears, users can trust that their digital assets are valid and safe. The protocol scales to billions of users without incurring significant computational or financial costs. Algorand achieves throughput of over 1,000 transactions per second and latency of less than 5 seconds — all realized in a fully distributed network. These metrics demonstrate how Algorand performs orders of magnitude better than existing blockchain platforms, and is also consistent with the world’s largest global payment networks. And, this is just the beginning; forthcoming advancements like Vault and Pixel are focused on improving the speed and scalability of the platform even further.
Building On MainNet
Algorand’s developer enablement program has been noted by Kalin Stoyanchev, Head of Blockchain at OTOY, a company that has been building on Algorand’s TestNet, as being “so much easier than other blockchains.” Our APIs and SDKs make it easy for developers to build layer 2 applications in their preferred programming languages. In fact, the Algo auctions are implemented as a layer 2 application with all data and transactions stored on the Algorand blockchain.
Here are examples of some projects that are building layer 2 applications on the Algorand platform now that MainNet has launched:
TOP Network is the world’s first blockchain-powered cloud communications network with over 60 million users. TOP Network offers a wide array of cloud communications services such as messaging, calling, VPN, CDN, IoT data sharing and more, all powered by Algorand’s blockchain technology.
AssetBlock is a financial services company modernizing real estate investment and leveraging digital assets through the tokenization of commercial real estate and collateralization of loans. With Algos in circulation, AssetBlock is giving private investors access to high-quality real estate investments through a digital-first platform, in addition to offering crypto holders loans for purchasing real estate.
OTOY Inc. is the cloud graphics company pioneering technology that is redefining content creation and delivery for media and entertainment organizations around the world. OTOY is making GPU rendering power more efficient for independent artists & major animation studios with the Render Network (RNDR). Using blockchain technology, RNDR creates a more efficient, powerful, widely scalable GPU cloud rendering network.
Syncsort is the global leader in Big Iron to Big Data software, organizing data that powers machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. They’re creatively connecting legacy systems to the Algorand blockchain to leverage traditional investments — unlocking valuable data and ensuring that it’s complete, accurate, and trusted.
The impact of MainNet launch extends beyond these innovative companies. Through the Algorand Foundation’s Global University Program, some of the world’s leading technology universities are working on technical research efforts to support the decentralized Algorand platform.
We’re also looking forward to seeing what Algorand users come up with as the developer community continues to innovate and build new DApps. We hope you’ll join us in our effort to build a truly Borderless Economy!
Get started here: https://developer.algorand.org/
