It’s a new series of biweekly updates on Algorand.
The official Algorand Developer Documentation repository is now public and open to contributions by the community. The developer documentation uses the Material for Mkdocs static doc generator to render the docs from markdown to HTML. If you are a developer, you can always submit sample code or step-by-step guides as Solutions or Tutorials in the Algorand Dev Portal. The Algorand Foundation is sponsoring rewards for such contributions as part of the Algorand Foundation Developer Ambassador Program.
Furthermore, Algorand announced that Attestiv will use its technology to enable digital transformation across the insurance industry, addressing an over $40B opportunity to reduce P&C insurance fraud in the US alone. The combination of Attestiv and Algorand represents the beginning of a transformation in the insurance industry to enable trust, automation, and new levels of customer satisfaction.
Moreover, the Algorand Foundation is excited to announce that Props is also a recipient of an Algorand Foundation Grant. Algorand’s public chain will increase Props’ speed and reliability, while powering more transaction volume and a higher level of security.
PlanetWatch, a French startup which decentralizes and incentivizes air quality monitoring by leveraging the Algorand blockchain, announced today that it has raised 550k EUR from a mix of private and institutional investors. The round was led by RA.MO.
Another exciting news! Silvio Micali discussed Algorand’s core tech, layer-1 strategy, co-chains & more at the CASummit.
What’s more, Cointelegraph interviewed Alogrand founder and Turing Award recipient Professor Silvio Micali to discuss blockchain-based solutions to contact-tracing amid the coronavirus crisis. Silvio Micali said: “The Algorand proposal is very simple: use the blockchain to guarantee that (1) the anonymized data reported on governmental websites is indeed genuine and (2) the citizens are given access to the very anonymized data they helped the government to collect. Algorand uses state-of-the-art cryptography (in particular, verifiable random functions) in order to guarantee that our blockchain is truly decentralized, scalable and secure.”
Read on for more detailed information!
Development
Github metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Check out the latest developer resources at developer.algorand.org
New Algorand Developer Portal
It has a new, enhanced interface and there are three new types of content for developers: Tutorials, Solutions, and Articles. These new content libraries complement Algorand Developer Docs.
Quick links:
Browse all JavaScript Tutorials
Development Awards Program
Contribute to the Algorand Developer Docs
The official Algorand Developer Documentation repository is now public and open to contributions by the community.
The official repository for the Algorand Developer Documentation is located at https://github.com/algorand/docs and is licensed under an MIT license.
Take a look at Algorand Contributing Guide for detailed information on the types of contributions they are looking for and how to get started.
The developer documentation uses the Material for Mkdocs static doc generator to render the docs from markdown to HTML, which provides several extra formatting options that are not accurately rendered in Github alone. You can check out examples that are currently live and map them back to their corresponding markdown file in the repository’s master branch. The dev team will add more style guides for writing docs in the future.
If you are not sure if your contribution would fall in that category, you can always submit sample code or step-by-step guides as Solutions or Tutorials in the Algorand Dev Portal. The Algorand Foundation is sponsoring rewards for these latter contributions as part of the Algorand Foundation Developer Ambassador Program.
Many of developers have already provided valuable feedback about Algorand documentation through the Algorand Forums
Docs
Workspace Setup
It’s a getting started guide for developers looking to build applications on the Algorand blockchain. Start here to learn what it means to build an application on Algorand and how to get started quickly.
Building an application on Algorand means that your application, directly or indirectly, reads from or writes to the Algorand blockchain. Writing to the Algorand blockchain is synonymous with issuing a transaction that will later be confirmed within a block. Reading from the blockchain means reading back transactions that have been confirmed within prior blocks.
A program connects to the Algorand blockchain through an algod client. The algod client requires a valid algod REST endpoint IP address and algod token from an Algorand node that is connected to the network you plan to interact with.
Available tools
Algorand officially supports four SDKs for developing applications on Algorand: Javascript, Java, Python, and Go.
An overview of Accounts on Algorand
It reviews core terminology and guides developers on how to interpret these terms in different contexts.
Learn commands and syntax for specific developer tools.
How to run a Node
Algorand Node Types
The Algorand network is comprised of two distinct types of nodes, relay nodes, and non-relay nodes. Relay nodes are primarily used for communication routing to a set of connected non-relay nodes. Relay nodes communicate with other relay nodes and route blocks to all connected non-relay nodes. Non-relay nodes only connect to relay nodes and can also participate in consensus. Non-relay nodes may connect to several relay nodes but never connect to another non-relay node.
In addition to the two node types, nodes can be configured to be archival and indexed. Archival nodes store the entire ledger and if the indexer is turned on, the search range via the API REST endpoint is increased.
Both node types use the same install procedure. To setup a node for a specific type, requires a few configuration parameter changes as described below. The default install will set the node up as a non-relay node in non-archival and non-indexed mode.
Please, read the full article to learn about additional configuration options.
Participate in Consensus
Register accounts to participate in Algorand consensus.
Community Projects
Browse existing projects built on Algorand.
Algorand Consensus
Learn more about how Algorand consensus works.
The Algorand blockchain uses a decentralized Byzantine Agreement protocol that leverages pure proof of stake (Pure POS). This means that it can tolerate malicious users, achieving consensus without a central authority, as long as a supermajority of the stake is in non-malicious hands. This protocol is very fast and requires minimal computational power per node, giving it the ability to finalize transactions efficiently.
More details about the protocol can be found here
Solutions
Decentralized Two-Factor Authentication With Algorand Standard Assets
Algorand Co-chains
Sign up for Algorand Developer Newsletter for the latest news, solutions, and tutorials on Algorand.
Social encounters
Silvio Micali discussed Algorand’s core tech, layer-1 strategy, co-chains & more at the CASummit.
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) & The Future of Financial Infrastructure — LIVE Q&A
Algorand’s LIVE Q&A features the team behind the world’s first national digital currency, the Marshallese sovereign (SOV).
In this discussion, the following topics are covered:
- How the SOV became the world’s first sovereign digital currency
- Why CBDC
- Why blockchain for CBDC
- Acceleration of CBDC and what the future holds
With the Bank of International Settlements recent estimation that over 80% of central banks are looking at blockchain to issue digital currencies, it’s becoming clear that blockchain has a strong case for dramatically improving today’s financial infrastructure.
What does the future of global money transfers look like?
Algorand talks about its efforts to revolutionize the way we transfer money: quickly and cheaply without a third party.
TL; DR:
- Blockchain technology, in general, is faster, less expensive and more secure than current payment and transaction systems.
- Algorand’s platform is especially well suited for retail payments due to its speed: it can process transactions in 5 seconds with a throughput of 1000 transactions per second.
- A point-of-sale solution includes a community created solution of a transaction gateway, a component that facilitates the process of creating decentralized apps for businesses, and orchestrates all types of transactions.
- Algorand wants to enable the next generation of blockchain applications to be built, the ones that can actually make a real impact on our lives. The challenge remains spreading awareness about their protocol’s potential.
If anyone is interested in building solutions with Algorand like the point of sale application, please reach out at eric@algorand.com.
Read the interview by The Daily Mover here
Cointelegraph interviewed Alogrand founder and Turing Award recipient Professor Silvio Micali to discuss blockchain-based solutions to contact-tracing amid the coronavirus crisis.
Highlights of the interview:
With some countries beginning to lift lockdown restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic, many are focusing attention on the technological tools that can help public authorities to comply with the World Health Organization’s guidance for COVID-19 suppression — — “test, trace, isolate.”
In a recent article, Professor Micali stated that there are broadly two models that have been proposed for developing apps that could help the international community to trace contacts between symptomatic/diagnosed COVID-19 sufferers and healthy individuals — and thus to fall closer into line with the WHO’s guidance.
One type of app would follow a model whereby a government or public health agency would store data in some form of centralized database. The other — as proposed by the likes of Apple and Google — follows a decentralized model, where all the relevant contact information would be stored only on users’ phones.
Micali’s proposal, based on blockchain technology, follows a third way — one that recognizes the need for a consolidated overview of all contact tracing data, but provides adequate privacy and data protection for individuals.
Silvio Micali:
“It should be emphasized that the consolidated data we are speaking of is totally anonymized. It is a database of how many qualified contacts are happening every day, nothing more.
A qualified contact is defined as a physically close encounter (e.g., less than one yard) for a sufficiently long time (e.g., at least 10 minutes). Each report is provided by the phone of an individual who has voluntarily opted into the system.
Reports do not disclose the identities of the people, nor those of the phones involved in any qualified encounters. They only report the number of qualified encounters. For instance, the anonymized database consists of the following list of reports, each made by a different phone at the end of the day:
- I (whoever I may be) had three qualified encounters today
- I (whoever I may be) had five qualified encounters today
Even though the information collected is quite minimal, it is very useful for the government to have this information. For instance, when opening or closing the beaches in a given state, the local authority can very easily see how much doing this has increased or decreased the number of qualified encounters.
As a further example, with this consolidated and anonymized data, the government may have a better sense of when to transition from one phase to the next in opening up the economy.
Our view is that when individuals voluntarily help to create such an anonymized database, it is only fair that they can see it too. The goal is to help reduce information asymmetries while protecting the privacy of individuals.
SM: A blockchain ledger is a “shared truth” in the sense that everyone sees the same information. The information to be posted on the blockchain cannot be censored and, once posted, cannot be altered. In our case, the shared truth is a list of anonymized reports of qualified encounters.
In situations such as the public health emergency we are currently facing, having public access to accurate data is critical. Truly decentralized blockchains can be of enormous value in this. Since they require no gatekeepers, everyone, the government and citizens alike, can be assured that the data they are seeing is the same data that everyone else is seeing.
This use of the blockchain builds trust. No one can be accused of fabricating data, because anyone could match the reports in the governmental database with those posted by citizens directly on the blockchain.
Note that even an honest government has an interest in guaranteeing to its citizens that no one can manipulate the reported data. In this case, more citizens are likely to volunteer their anonymized data. And the wider the adoption of the system, the more successful it will be.
I am a technologist. I believe in technology. But I also believe that technology is only part of the solution. This said, why not take advantage of the best technology we have available?
The Algorand proposal is very simple: use the blockchain to guarantee that (1) the anonymized data reported on governmental websites is indeed genuine and (2) the citizens are given access to the very anonymized data they helped the government to collect.
Algorand uses state-of-the-art cryptography (in particular, verifiable random functions) in order to guarantee that our blockchain is truly decentralized, scalable and secure.
Prior to the advent of Algorand, it was a widespread belief that any blockchain could satisfy at most two of the three mentioned properties: decentralization, scalability and security. It was hard to choose which of the three one should sacrifice: the so called blockchain trilemma!
Solving the trilemma has been a major contribution of Algorand. Now that we can enjoy all these three properties, the blockchain has a much greater potential to help us solve societal problems such as the ones we are currently dealing with.
Contact-tracing is crucial. But so is privacy. More generally, both correctness and privacy are crucial. Naively, one may think that they are necessarily at odds with each other and that one can at most hope to find some reasonable compromise. Yet one of the technological triumphs of modern cryptography is enabling the co-existence of perfect privacy and perfect correctness. But we technologists have not succeeded in explaining this to the public, and every time the debate starts from very archaic positions.
I believe and hope that the media will be more successful in this educational mission than we technologists have been. To each her own trade!”
Algorand’s Approach to COVID-19 Tracing
Upcoming events
The Algorand team 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.
Check out this community.algorand.org page for more information on upcoming events.
Finance
Mainnet stats (information from https://algoexplorer.io)
Algo Dynamics
The Algorand blockchain network has its own official native cryptocurrency, called the Algo, to drive their borderless economy and the system of incentives. The allocation of Algos and how they are being distributed is presented here. The Foundation holds Algos to contribute to the stability of the Algorand blockchain and to support the Algorand community, ecosystem building and research. The Algos will enter the ecosystem via various channels including development and research grants and sales. All such activities will be disclosed with full transparency to the community.
Create an Account on the Algorand Wallet
Pairing Your Algorand Wallet with Ledger Nano X
Follow the link to go through the end-to-end process of setting up your Nano X, pairing the Nano X with your Algorand Wallet, and finally, signing transactions with the Nano X’s bluetooth capabilities.
Those who don’t have a Nano X device, can check out the article on how to Create an Account on the Algorand Wallet in the series of Algorand Wallet tutorials.
How to add Tether USDT to your Algorand wallet
In Algorand, to avoid spamming your address with tokens and assets, you need to manually opt in to the asset that you wish to receive. This Opt-In transaction involves sending a 0 amount of the asset you wish to add to your account to yourself.
Check out this tutorial on how to Opt-In and add Tether’s USDt to your Algorand wallet in My Algo in order to be able to receive it.
You can choose to watch the tutorial which will help you to facilitate the whole process.
Roadmap
By combining cutting-edge research and innovation with an ecosystem that enables ease and speed of development, the Algorand Foundation strives to anticipate and fulfill future technology needs.
The Algorand Foundation has contracted with Algorand, Inc. to begin development on several advancements to the foundational Algorand public blockchain.
VAULT™
Vault is a blockchain compression technology that allows new users to immediately join and participate in the Algorand network without a burdensome download.
View Whitepaper: Vault: Fast Bootstrapping for the Algorand Cryptocurrency
Algorand’s Forthcoming Technology, by Silvio Micali
PIXEL
Pixel is a new digital signature scheme built for Proof of Stake systems that reduce space requirements through committee member signature aggregation while maintaining forward-security through key rotation.
Pixel-signatures: Efficient and Secure Digital Signatures for Proof-of-Stake Blockchains
Algorand’s Forthcoming Technology, by Silvio Micali
SELF-VALIDATING TRANSACTIONS
Self-validating transactions are an advance that allows separation of consensus and storage to enhance the efficiency and the logical structure of the Algorand blockchain.
Algorand’s Forthcoming Technology, by Silvio Micali
ATOMIC² SWAPS
Atomic² swaps leverage Algorand’s instant transaction finality and implement same-chain swaps of assets, without any type of time- or hash-locks, in a single transaction.
Algorand’s Forthcoming Technology, by Silvio Micali
POST-AND-SALE TRADES
An exchange of assets usually requires interactivity: prior to delivering the asset, a seller must find a buyer and negotiate terms. Post-and-sale trade technology will allow any seller to post assets for sale, at a given price. Any buyer can browse these offers, pay the price and receive the asset immediately without having to interact at all with the seller or any third party.
Algorand’s Forthcoming Technology, by Silvio Micali
SMART² CONTRACTS
Smart contracts permit trusted transactions and agreements to be carried between parties around the world without the need of a trusted third party, but they can be slow and expensive.
Smart² contracts™ leverage Algorand’s consensus mechanism to offer faster and cheaper forms of smart contracts.
Partnerships and team members
Algorand Announces First Insurtech Use Case: Attestiv Digital Media Validation for Fraud Prevention
Algorand announced that Attestiv will use its technology to enable digital transformation across the insurance industry, addressing an over $40B opportunity to reduce P&C insurance fraud in the US alone.
Attestiv’s core technology enables digital media, sensor data, metadata, and more to be validated using patent-pending AI technology either at the point of capture or via forensic analysis. Once media is captured, it becomes tamper-proof via a “fingerprinting” process, a unique representation of the digital media asset, similar to a human fingerprint, that can identify future changes or alterations. These fingerprints are then stored onto the Algorand blockchain to ensure the data has not been altered from its original form.
By building on Algorand, Attestiv can ensure a range of privacy and security options that gives regulated businesses the required levels of compliance. In addition, Algorand offers Attestiv a competitive cost structure that can grow and scale with the company.
W. Sean Ford, COO of Algorand said:
“Attestiv is disrupting the insurance industry by helping organizations of all types build trust and transform their business by leveraging our open, decentralized blockchain. We are excited to welcome the Attestiv team to the Algorand ecosystem and help them to transform the insurance industry.”
The combination of Attestiv and Algorand represents the beginning of a transformation in the insurance industry to enable trust, automation, and new levels of customer satisfaction.
Algorand Blockchain speeds the growth of Props
Since Algorand Foundation launched its 250M ALGO Grants Program in April, many developers around the world have been eager to participate and have started to submit their proposals.
Last week, Union Square Ventures and Borderless Capital announced their investment in https://propsproject.com. This week, the Algorand Foundation is excited to announce that Props is also a recipient of an Algorand Foundation Grant.
To support the growing volume of activity on its PropsChain and provide greater transparency to network participants and the market, PropsChain will be moving to Algorand. Algorand’s public chain will increase Props’ speed and reliability, while powering more transaction volume and a higher level of security. Algorand’s unique combination of scale, speed, security and finality brings together all the efficiency of a private blockchain with the scale of a truly decentralized public blockchain.
Initially, the Algorand Foundation’s grant will help facilitate Props in moving their Pending Props token off their private chain and onto the Algorand blockchain as an Algorand Standard Asset (ASA). The grant will also support the investigation and evaluation of moving Props’ ERC-20 token to the Algorand blockchain.
Check out Props updates and developments at https://propsproject.com/ and https://twitter.com/PROPSproject.
PlanetWatch completes seed round to further real-time air quality monitoring on Algorand
PlanetWatch, a French startup which decentralizes and incentivizes air quality monitoring by leveraging the Algorand blockchain, announced today that it has raised 550k EUR from a mix of private and institutional investors. The round was led by RA.MO.
PlanetWatch will store real-time data gathered from a dense mesh of air quality sensors onto the Algorand blockchain, and subsequently reward contributions to the ecosystem by distributing the PLANET token, a utility token, to sensor owners. Most sensors are installed by individuals inside or outside their homes or carried with them on the go, with additional sensors installed by PlanetWatch in partnership with transport and telecommunications companies, local authorities, etc.
PlanetWatch’s high-density network aims to tackle the problem of undetected local air pollution peaks occurring e.g. in urban canyons, where dangerous pollution levels may be reached relatively close to governmental sensors reporting acceptable air quality. In addition, PlanetWatch data will be instrumental to identify air pollution causes at the local level.
W. Sean Ford, COO of Algorand said: “PlanetWatch’s ability to close a successful round of funding and also deliver a Minimum Viable Product demonstrates the value of their environmental solution on blockchain. We have been supporting this project from its inception and we look forward to their full launch in the coming months.”
PlanetWatch is currently testing its platform and aims for a full launch during the summer.
For more information, visit https://www.planetwatch.io.
About RA.MO
RA.MO is an Italian investment and cultural holding company already known for its drawing collection by 900 Italian artists and Belleville -Typee school with its innovative approach at writing teaching and critical thinking.
Algorand is always looking for professionals!
They are looking for the best and brightest to be part of their growing team in a cutting edge industry.
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