How did you discover Algorand?

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 :handshake: 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.

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I was on discord in the XOGE server for XRP, and they mentioned that you got a 1:1 on the algo chain. So I came across the chains slid into the Algonauts discord set up some crazy pools for XOGE with all these different trading pairs, didn’t know much too much just kept tinkering around. Then the big moment came, (islandboy.algo) mentioned Bartle Doo , I did my research :face_with_monocle: found their twitter account and instantly fell in love :heart_eyes_cat: with how funny the intro video was. It absolutely made me laugh because it summed up everything of what a new crypto pioneer is feeling along with the coin doing well. Now who knows what the future holds as we continue to build BD marketing ;). We still extend our offer to staci.algo to join BD marketing at Oheka castle :european_castle: anytime she’s in New York. This offer is extended to anyone interested from the algorand foundation that wants to grow the community and bring a huge impact. I know fool around and joke a lot , Talent attracts talent.
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Fricking Coin Bureau about mid 2021. I was new to Crypto and watched like 20 of his videos when he still covered many projects, and I remember being impressed by Algorand and mostly its team the most. Obviously I didn’t know anything at the time about technical metrics, PPoS, tokenomics etc. are, so I went and did some research (research obviously only after having bought some, because I was - am - a total noob investor), and since then I really got more involved. Now I look for info mainly on reddit and twitter, and also on discord. As the bear market came I decided that I only wanted projects that I believed into my portfolio, and here I am with only BTC and ALGO. Set up a participation node (and voiced multiple times my complaints about how the governance rewards structure currently is terrible and keeps getting worse for node runners, so I voice it again here) and brought down my cost average.

Still love the projects and believe into it, but it is very frustrating seeing projects that I consider vastly inferior sign important partnerships while Algorand seems to be always lagging behind, going the obscure way. See yesterdays announcement about AVAX and AWS for reference… I’d love something like that going on on Algorand, though I assume many things are involved that go behiond the pros and cons of a specific chain. What I want to say is that while announcing things only when they are done, a little hype goes a long way to entice retail investors and keep them interested. Also a clear roadmap helps to get a grasp in what to expect for both the technical side and the business (“partnerships”) side. Like, is there interest in the technologies? Are there enterprises or governments or other entities actively interested in Algorand? Obviously without naming names.

So those are my two cents. Ant thanks for making this enquiries. This and Adri involvment with the governance program makes me feel like the Foundation is finally trying to really listen to what the retail portion of the user base feel. This is an area that I always found lacking before.

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Ah yes, that guy! :slight_smile: Love his videos, very well organized, informative, honest and well balanced

By the way, if you do not already, I think that posting this question it in the AlgorandOfficial subreddit would get you many, many more answers than in this official forum.

Posted there!

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2 years ago I was in the application of my bank, and I saw that they let you buy cryptos, I saw the list that there was and I began to study one by one, but only Algorand caught my attention and here I am

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I started purchasing bitcoin, ether and algo via Blockchain.com in early 2021 (suggested from a friend of mine). I was initially attracted to Algorand because I thought that it had a really cool name and symbol. Anyway, I fell into the crypto rabbit hole and started studying. Started then using algo for transactions and compared it to bitcoin and ether. The rest is history. I am a participation node runner and a governor since the beginning.

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From Reach-sh - hackathon using Algorand

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For many years I had been working as a general business systems developer primarily with Microsoft technologies, in organisations small and large, from startups to large banks.

The creativity and excitement made the startup experience the most attractive to me. I had a business idea that would have benefited from a more open backend platform, involving discount coupons and promotion for small businesses and tourism in rural areas. Originally I looked into Ethereum for this idea, having very little knowledge of blockchain and its capabilities, only to eventually find that the entire platform was both experimental and ineffective for my needs.

This led me to switch to remote mobile apps development for a couple of years, abandoning crypto as “too young,” but keeping an eye on things out of curiosity.

What initially led me to Algorand was that according to what I had been reading, the platform was capable of high volume, low cost transactions, offered sound security, and actually had a cryptographer as its inventor. But what really got me interested in Algorand was one of Russ Fustino’s technical articles showing how to integrate Algorand into native mobile app development using Microsoft technology. This then led me to the Developer documentation, which I think is second to none in this space. It made me realise that Algorand cares about onboarding developers and making things easily understood.

While many blockchain and distributed ledger systems appeal to academia and people excited about this technology for its own sake, very few seem to make proper efforts to bridge with mainstream commercial developers, and I think Algorand is on the path to doing that.

I was going to also respond to another question on this forum about the lack of non-finance dApps. My feeling is that this is on the way. I can see several classes of business use case and business models that would benefit from Algorand, but these things take time. Just building the tooling to make Algorand available to those who, say, use Microsoft tech, Java, Oracle, Unity game tools, etc., is time consuming. People who innovate new companies are doing so for various reasons, but all of them to make viable businesses. These teams don’t choose their tech because one is better than the other, it’s because they have existing teams who are familiar with some existing tech. Selecting an Oracle db over a SQL Server db isn’t done because one is better than the other, it’s because the team or the decision maker wants to go a certain direction and knows how to use that stuff effectively. Algorand just needs to cross over more into the mainstream commercial development consciousness, and it will get selected as a tool of choice for both existing and new types of business.

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Interesting, must be something in the name! Do you remember what are the other crypto options?

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No way, I used to be a node operator myself (and it’s still in operation coz they’re unstoppable!) Glad to see you’re now deep in the rabbit hole :hole: :rabbit2:

Not only the name, the Carbon negative thing it’s something big.
The another cryptos names was eth, sol, ada, BNB.

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Algorand is a remarkable technical feat.
However, it cannot be recommended to the general publc.
Why? Because it looses value all the time.
No reasonable person wants to burn money, or invest to the future with negative result

To answer the original question, I discovered Prof. Micali’s paper about VRF, and also read one of his papers about Bitcoin. I thought then that Algorand will be a real competitor for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Great points to ponder. Love to hear from another Web2 techie who’s now dabbling in Web3.

We’re definitely aligned on heading in the direction of developer adoption, by having the Foundation support SDKs in JS (see NPM trends), Python, GoLang and Java. I’m gathering the trends and measuring how developers are going through their journey, from ideation to mainnet. Here’s a snapshot of how often the algosdk is pulled via NPM for Javascript developers


We’re trending the right direction! (during the end of year holiday season, every codebase has that dip)


… and we flipped Polkadot in Oct 2022!

There’s also a long tail of Community-based SDKs as well in Rust, PHP, Swift (yes, iOS!!!), Dart, .NET and Unity.

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I think we need to separate the two between token prices and the underlying technology.

In terms of tokenomics, if we compare it with fiat money, if we hold a fiat (government backed) currency, the capital markets are meant to inflate by continuously printing new money every year. So if you’re holding 1 USD today, 5 years from now it’s worth closer to 0.80 USD. The tokenomics of Algorand is the tokens will increase over time until a few years from now where no new tokens will be issued. It flattens out. It’s actually going to be better than (fiat currency) money as we know it today. Time will tell.

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Interesting graphs. On the SDKs, yes, I maintain the .NET SDK and partially the Unity SDK and I am nearing completion of an initial version of Visual Studio IDE tooling and C# → TEAL compiler. The next steps with that are to transition the product out of a closed pre-alpha development mode to being used to develop real apps by a ‘friendly’ development team who will help live-test the new tooling.

One task I had a long time ago was at a tech R&D lab for a multinational web jobsearch firm. Their process for discovering new opportunities and threats involved a so-called “idea pipeline.” The ideas were sourced from various places and run through an evaluation to see if the business model was a viable opportunity, or threat. (For example, a competitor startup in the space might have been identified and selected for acquisition.) This process was an inspiration and has stuck with me for a long time. I don’t know if AF is doing this already, but following along the lines of that model, one possibility would be to somehow plugin to existing VC due diligence or normal “web2” tech incubators, just to sit in on their idea/startup acquisition and evaluation process to catch new businesses at an early stage when their technical direction is still not set in stone. Algorand technical representatives could then propose the platform as an alternative, where viable, and connect those VCs/Incubators/etc with relevant resources.

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You’re the guy maintaining .NET! That’s amazing, and I’m thrilled to meet you here!! Can’t wait to see the C# → TEAL compiler too. Wow! :star_struck:

Yes, “idea pipeline” is something we’re putting in place also. We now have an investment committee and which comes with an accelerator service. I’ve not been with Algorand Foundation long enough, and I’ll need to dig deeper into our past connections with accelerators such as Draper University and Techstars. We run due diligences weekly with multiple inbound requests from all verticals, I’m pleasantly surprised by this as we’re getting some good attention from some of the most reputable folks in this space, or major enterprises that are new to this space interested to pursue working with Algorand.

Me llamo la atención la inversión en cristo monedas y descubrí varios juegos los cuales te dan a ganar dichas criotmmonesas así fue como llegue a Algorand