I’m really curious to hear from folks about their journey into Algorand. If you can share your story here, it may help the Foundation better understand the current audience and fine tune the messaging for the greater masses. What really brought you to Algorand and blockchain in general?
In full transparency, when I first heard about Algorand, probably early 2018, it was through a friend talking up about Silvio Micali, MIT Professor, Turing Award winner, and so on. It gave this chain he founded a bit more credibility vs. all the other chains out there at that time. The term Proof of Stake (PoS) was hitting crypto media while Proof of Work (PoW) have taken a stronghold of enabling distributed networks which “worked”. The notion of creating the next Internet (before Web3 was coined) became really exciting to me.
Besides Algorand, there were other PoS chains like Tezos, Cosmos, Polkadot, NEAR and Oasis Network, amongst the dozen others, all trying to grab one’s attention. I became really interested then and decided to make it a hobby to research and tinkered with decentralized storage as scaling cloud infrastructure relates to my career interests, with Sia, IPFS/Filecoin and Storj. Experimented with mining Ethereum and Litecoin, to then spin up dozens of GPUs, and it was hard work. Sold the rigs away as I realized Proof of Work was harmful to the environment despite the rewarding incentives there. As PoS took center stage, I leveled up my involvement with a side hustle and manage to rank up as block producing network operator in 6 chains, some of which are amongst the Top 10 networks, such as Cosmos and Cardano.
As far as I know, Algorand didn’t have an open staking option back then for indie network operators to come in to support the network, so I wasn’t able to tinker with it as a network operator. Running participation nodes are possible, but it was similar to Ripple which filled my curiosity but I couldn’t go further.
Algorand always seem to be around, sponsoring events, with some brief announcements. CT (Crypto Twitter crowd) seems disgruntled over Algorand’s terrible marketing, I’d say it’s not aggressively marketed for every hand wavy “partnership” between “Brand A Chain B”. I think it’s the right call, to announce only when things are nearly done. Hence I can see that CT complains the culture is different, things being less transparent and the “army” of troops tooting relentlessly about ALGO isn’t as ruthless.
Anyhow, my journey continued in Web3 by jumping in with both feet, with an EVM-compatible chain, working on Engineering, Partnerships and Ventures for a 1+ year stint which felt like several years. I then heard about a huge shift in Algorand’s direction under Staci Warden’s leadership to aggressively grow Algorand’s ecosystem and it excites me to grow Web3. Really fortunate to have joined the Foundation since, focused on the technical integrations and developer outreach programs at Algorand.
Would love to hear more about your journey.