ALGOUSD
Algorand / United States dollar
crypto Composite

Algorand is a scalable, secure, and decentralized digital currency and smart contract platform. Its protocol uses a variation of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) called Pure PoS (PPoS) to secure the network and reach consensus on block production. Unlike other PoS models, PPoS does not reward, nor does it put validator or user funds at risk of being slashed (a loss of funds used to promote honest node and user behavior). Algorand intends to eventually leverage its PPoS design to form the foundation for an on-chain governance system. Algorand utilizes a Pure Proof of Stake, where validators are not rewarded nor are they at risk of being slashed. It becomes impossible for the minority to cheat and irrational for the majority to cheat the system as it would devalue their holdings. There is also no locking of tokens so a user has their tokens available at all times. Blocks are created in two phases where a single token is selected randomly and its owner proposes the next block. Subsequently, 1000 random tokens are selected with their owners then approving the block proposed by the first user. These phases are ensured by the core protocol called Binary Byzantine Agreement, or Byzantine Agreement ★ ('Star'), encompassing the following advancements: Cryptographic sortition (self-selection) To prevent an adversary from targeting committee members, BA★ uses verifiable random functions (VRFs) to randomly select committee members in a private and non-interactive way. Participant replaceability. BA★ mitigates adversary targeting a committee member by requiring committee members to speak just once, thus becoming irrelevant to BA★. Experimental results running on 1,000 Amazon EC2 VMs demonstrate that Algorand can confirm a 1 MByte block of transactions in ~22 seconds with 50,000 users, latency remains nearly constant when scaling to half a million users, it achieves 125X the transaction throughput of Bitcoin, and that Algorand achieves acceptable latency even in the presence of actively malicious users. A test network for the protocol was launched in July 2018, and the first open-source code was released on Github in October 2018. As such, Algorand encourages anyone to audit its version of the VRF, forked and extended from the widely popular libsodium cryptographic library.