Algorand: Protocol Upgrade Released to BetaNet, 2 Post-Quantum Standards Entering For NIST’s Competition, Borderless Capital Partners With StakerDAO To Accelerate Access to DeFi Across Algorand, The Launch Of ORE ID And ChainJS by AIKON
Biweekly update 1st August — 15th August
Hello to the amazing Algorand community! As usual, we are here to share a recap of news and events from within the Algorand ecosystem. These weeks were quite fruitful for the Foundation, teams, and grantees, so let’s point out some of the key updates. On Wednesday, the 5th of August, a protocol upgrade was released to BetaNet introducing three brand new features to the Algorand protocol — Stateful Smart Contracts, Rekeying, and Fast Catchup. In the update below, You can find an article that explains what these features are and will point you to new documentation on how to use them.
Furthermore, Algorand’s cryptography engineer, Dr. Zhenfei Zhang, working with collaborators from IBM, NTT, NCC, Qualcomm, etc., contributed two post-quantum standards entering the 3rd Round of NIST’s Competition. They are NTRU — a public key encryption scheme, and Falcon — a digital signature scheme. NIST started a process in 2016 to select post-quantum cryptography candidates for standardization in order to mitigate the threat going from quantum computers.
As for the media highlights, don’t miss a video introducing Props CEO & Co-Founder Adi Sideman as part of Algorand Asia Accelerator. Adi Sideman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Props, gives an intro on their project, discusses how it all started, shares why they chose Algorand and provides advice to new founders and startups in this interview for Algorand Asia Accelerator, the Finance 3.0 focused blockchain accelerator program launched by the Algorand Foundation, Borderless Capital, and powered by LongHash Ventures. Also, read Sinjin David Jung featuring Algorand’s pure proof-of-stake approach in his new Cointelegraph article, ‘2020 Is Becoming the Year of Staking With Some Major Achievements.
Besides, En[code] Algorand Club is to be launched on the 31st of August. The ‘Club’ is a 10-week online pre-accelerator taking the best university, hackathon, and early-stage projects worldwide and helping them take the leap to become fully-fledged startups.
Borderless Capital Invests in and partners with StakerDAO to accelerate access to DeFi across Algorand Ecosystem. StakerDAO’s first financial product, Blend (BLND), will launch on Algorand, with plans for additional DeFi products in the coming months. BLND, which is available today via CoinList as a synthetic ERC20 token and shortly as an Algorand ASA token, tracks a governed basket of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) tokens and offers the easiest way to go long on the best PoS networks.
By the way, AIKON, Algorand grantee, and the Algo Foundation announced the official launch of the Algorand blockchain integration for AIKON’s core service, ORE ID, and AIKON’s open-source developer library, ChainJS. Their flagship product, ORE ID, is a simple user onboarding and blockchain identity management service. With ORE ID, users get an utterly seamless blockchain experience similar to modern web 2.0 applications.
That’s all for now — check the update below to learn more!
Development
Check out the latest developer resources at developer.algorand.org
Pablo Yabo shared some info on the recent update: Stateful TEAL SC and a killer feature: Rekeying allows changing Private Keys anytime keeping the Public Addresses. Algorand is reducing drastically the pain points of blockchain while adding huge scalability.
To mitigate the threat going from quantum computers, NIST started a process in 2016 to select post-quantum cryptography candidates for standardization. NIST is the de facto authority in cryptography standardization. To name a few, it has standardized AES, SHA2, SHA3, etc. The candidate PQC algorithms is thought to replace most of the existing public key infrastructure, i.e., the aforementioned RSA, Diffie-Hellman and ECDSA schemes. NIST received over 80 submissions from world’s top universities and industry leaders. After 4 years of evaluation, and 3 rounds of eliminations, NIST finally announced 7 finalists this July, among which, 4 are public key encryption algorithms, and 3 are digital signature schemes. Algorand’s cryptography engineer, Dr. Zhenfei Zhang, working with collaborators from IBM, NTT, NCC, Qualcomm, etc., contributed to 2 candidates:
- NTRU — a public key encryption scheme. You can experiment NTRU on Google Chrome at this link.
- Falcon — a digital signature scheme. Falcon is a drop in replacement of ECDSA and Ed25519, two common signatures used by the community. Falcon also enables state-of-the-art post-quantum ring signatures, a privacy enhancement method for blockchains.
In a related topic, Zhenfei also contributed to LAC: Practical Ring-LWE Based Public-Key Encryption with Byte-Level Modulus, a first award winner of Chinese PQC competition, hosted by Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research.
Social encounters
“One novel approach is Algorand’s “pure proof-of-stake.” Algorand is a truly decentralized blockchain that has recently experienced a 30% market capitalization spike after its listing on Coinbase. It relies upon the statistically low number of malicious actors and a lottery of nodes to ensure fair voting. Algorand 2.0’s protocol solves the trilemma, as its staking mechanism enables high throughput capacity without sacrificing the security that derives from decentralization.”
Adi Sideman, CEO and Co-Founder of Props introduces Props, discusses how it all started, shares why they chose Algorand and gives advice to new founders and startups in this interview for Algorand Asia Accelerator, the Finance 3.0 focused blockchain accelerator program launched by the Algorand Foundation, Borderless Capital, and powered by LongHash Ventures.
- Tal Rabin, Head of Research, from the Algorand Foundation was speaking on The Blockchain Trilemmia in DeFi, Consensus Algorithms, and Interoperability
An article mentioning Algorand blockchain.
“Algorand is one blockchain technology company looking at addressing lowering global transaction fees. They have created their own advanced smart contracts by innovating a new computer language. This technical advancement for payments hopes to help build the economy of the future.”
Upcoming events
- 31st August 2020 — En[code] Algorand Club. The ‘Club’ is a 10-week online pre-accelerator taking the best university, hackathon and early-stage projects worldwide and helping them take the leap to becoming fully-fledged startups.
Finance
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
Borderless Capital announced that they have invested in and partnered with StakerDAO to accelerate access to decentralized financial products throughout the Algorand Ecosystem. StakerDAO’s first financial product, Blend (BLND), will launch on Algorand, with plans for additional DeFi products in the coming months. BLND, which is available today via CoinList as a synthetic ERC20 token and shortly as an Algorand ASA token, tracks a governed basket of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) tokens and offers the easiest way to go long on the best PoS networks. With a single BLND ASA (Algorand Standard Asset) token, qualified individuals can now instantly participate in Algorand, Tezos, and Cosmos. BLND provides both price exposure to these blockchain projects, as well as exposure to the staking rewards these networks generate. More information is available at www.blendtoken.com for qualified participants.
In May 2020, the Algorand Foundation announced AIKON as one of the first recipients of the Algorand Foundation Grants Program. This grant helped AIKON bring its suite of blockchain developer tools and services to the Algorand blockchain. Finally, AIKON and the Algorand Foundation announced the official launch of the Algorand blockchain integration for AIKON’s core service, ORE ID, and AIKON’s open-source developer library, ChainJS. Their flagship product, ORE ID, is a simple user onboarding and blockchain identity management service. With ORE ID, users get a completely seamless blockchain experience that is similar to modern web 2.0 applications. ORE ID handles account creation, multisig accounts, password resets, signing transactions, and resource management — and it’s offered through a REST API and Javascript libraries that make it easy enough for any developer to use. ORE ID is especially powerful for enterprises that want to migrate their existing user base to Algorand. The ORE ID API can batch process existing email addresses or other unique IDs to create Algorand wallets for those users.
- Also read — Build on Algorand Today
AIKON, the recent Algorand grantee wrote an article on the benefits of building on Algorand, its use-cases, and when AIKON comes to play.
Read an overview on why they chose to build their products on Algorand’s blockchain and why they recommend their partners to build on Algorand technology. The main reason Rand Labs team is confident of Algorand’s technology is that Algorand is being built with a very long-term mindset. Every single feature, detail, and decision is made thinking of the long-term scalability of the Algorand network.
- Algorand Ambassador of the Quarter
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