In mid April 2021, cryptocurrency firm Coinbase, ran a top exchange for Bitcoin and other digital currency trading, hit a market value of nearly $100bn (£72.5bn) in its stock market listing.
Photo by Pixabay
Later City News: The price of Bitcoin surged more than 300% last year - and has climbed even higher in 2021 - as firms including Tesla, Mastercard and BlackRock unveiled plans to incorporate digital currencies into their businesses, BBC reported.
A part of Bitcoin, there are more than 45 cryptocurrencies tradable on Coinbase alone. In the last few years, tokens that help power decentralized finance (or DeFi) protocols have become increasingly popular — and so a number of the cryptocurrencies on this list come from that world.
If you’re ready to figure out the difference between these "altcoins" (short for “alternative coins”) we are going to introduce Algorand, here.
Algorand is a Boston-based open-source software company working towards building a borderless economy. They've developed a permissionless, PureProof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol with open participation, scalability, security and transaction finality.
Algorand was founded in 2017 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and Turing Award-winning cryptographer Silvio Micali, and is backed by notable venture firms, including Union Square Ventures.
It is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that supports smart contracts. Its protocol uses Pure PoS, through which users are selected on a random and secret basis to propose blocks and vote on proposals.
Figures by Algorand.com
Algorand had previously been chosen by Circle as one of the platforms to host its USDC stablecoin and the Marshall Islands also chose the network for its national digital currency.
In fact, an Algo is the crypto-currency of the Algorand blockchain. The Algorand blockchain has been built to help create an open, borderless economy where everybody can participate. This new type of digital economy can only run on a truly digital currency that works instantly, for everybody.
Algorand uses cryptographic sortition to select users to propose blocks for a given round. When a block is proposed to the blockchain, a committee of voters is selected to vote on the block proposal. If a super majority of the votes are from honest participants, the block can be certified.
Coinbase has explained that Algorand seeks to build on similar projects like Ethereum by improving scalability, security, and reducing the amount of time it takes for transactions on the network to be considered “final.”
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Developers can use Algorand to create decentralized applications — for loans, decentralized trading, and many other uses — that can take advantage of fast, low-cost transaction processing while scaling to a large number of users.
Figure by Coinbase.com
How it works: Algorand nodes reach consensus about what should appear in the blockchain through a process called PPoS (or “Pure Proof of Stake”) — which uses a staking system (instead of a Proof of Work mining system like Bitcoin’s) to verify new transactions and produce new crypto tokens.
Algorand network participants (or nodes) are able to stake some of their ALGO in exchange for the chance to be randomly selected to propose a new block of verified transaction. The winner is awarded new ALGO.
Keep in mind: PPoS systems like Algorand’s are more efficient than Proof of Work blockchains like Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption, because they don’t rely on thousands of miners spending energy to solve cryptographic puzzles for the chance to win a block reward and earn transaction fees.
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