A Love Letter to a Boring Blockchain

By day I work in a world of regulatory reporting, settlement finality, and documents that have to be right. By night, apparently, I relax by reading consensus protocol papers about a blockchain that is obsessed with the exact same things.

My therapist has thoughts. I have a blog.

So. Algorand. Let me explain the crush.

The origin story is unreasonably good

Most blockchain projects start with a pitch deck. This one started with someone who had already won the Turing Award.

Silvio Micali is an MIT cryptographer who helped invent zero knowledge proofs, the mathematical trick that lets you prove you know a secret without revealing the secret. Think of proving you know the password to a door by opening the door while everyone watches from a room with no view of the keypad. He won computing's equivalent of the Nobel Prize in 2012. Then, in 2017, he apparently got bored and decided to have a go at the blockchain trilemma.

The trilemma is the old "fast, cheap, decentralised: pick two" problem. His answer, launched as a live network in 2019, is called pure proof of stake, and the core idea is genuinely lovely.

Every round, the network runs a secret lottery. Every participating account checks, entirely on its own machine, whether it won a ticket to propose or vote on the next block. The lottery is weighted by how much stake you hold, and it uses a verifiable random function: the winner can prove they won, but nobody can predict or influence who wins in advance.

Here is the beautiful part. Nobody knows who the committee members are until after they have spoken. You cannot bribe them, DDoS them, or lean on them, because you do not know who they are, and by the time you find out their job is done and a fresh committee has been drawn for the next round.

It is jury duty, if the jury were selected at random from the entire population, served anonymously, and were replaced roughly every three seconds.

It does not fork, and I find that romantic

Here is the thing that made me sit up.

On most blockchains, a transaction is not really final when it appears. It is probably final. It gets more probably final with each block that stacks on top of it. This is why exchanges make you wait for confirmations, and why "how many blocks until we are sure" is a real engineering question. The chain can, in principle, reorganise underneath you. History is negotiable for a while.

Algorand does not do that. The consensus protocol is built so the chain cannot fork. When a block is agreed, it is agreed. Blocks land in under three seconds, finality comes with them, and there is no such thing as waiting for confirmations because there is nothing left to confirm.

I spend my professional life around settlement, reconciliation, and the deeply unglamorous question of when a thing has definitely happened. A system that answers that question with "now, and forever, and here is the proof" pushes a button in my brain that I did not know was there.

Tokens are part of the furniture

This is the design decision I bring up at parties, which explains a lot about my invitations.

On most chains, creating a token means writing and deploying a smart contract. You are essentially building your own post office before you can send a letter. It works, it is flexible, and it also means every token is bespoke software that can contain bespoke bugs. A frightening amount of the industry's stolen money has walked out through a hole in somebody's homemade post office.

On Algorand, a token is a built-in transaction type called an Algorand Standard Asset (ASA), and creating one is not deployment, it is form filling. You specify a name, a total supply, how many decimal places, and a handful of optional management addresses, and you send a transaction. The post office already exists, and it is the same post office everyone uses.

Issuing an asset costs a fraction of a cent and takes one transaction. The same primitive covers a stablecoin, a loyalty point, a share in a gold bar, and a picture of a donkey, which is exactly as it should be, because to the ledger they are all just numbers with rules attached.

Atomic transfers, or the simultaneous handshake

My other favourite layer-one feature has no equivalent on most chains without writing code.

You can group up to sixteen transactions together and submit them as one unit. Either every transaction in the group succeeds, or none of them do. No smart contract required: it is a property of the transaction format itself.

This is the digital version of the moment in a hostage exchange film where both sides walk their person forward and let go at the same instant. I pay you, you deliver to me, and neither leg can happen without the other. Trustless swaps, circular trades between five parties who do not know each other, escrow with no escrow agent, all expressible without a line of program logic.

Once you have used it, going back to "deploy a contract to do a swap safely" feels like being asked to build a bridge in order to cross a road.

NFTs, and the joke that is also the point

Ready for the most deflating definition of an NFT you will ever read?

On Algorand, a non-fungible token is just a standard asset with a total supply of one and zero decimal places.

That is it. That is the whole thing. A unique digital item is a print run of one. And a fractional NFT, the thing other ecosystems built entire protocols for, is the same idea with the decimal point moved. The maths was already there. Nobody had to invent anything.

I love this because it strips the mystique out and leaves the actual mechanism visible. An NFT was never magic. It was always a ledger entry saying there is exactly one of these and this address has it.

Where it gets genuinely clever is the metadata standards, which the community numbers as ARCs. A few worth knowing:

• ARC-3 is the sensible one. Point the asset's URL field at a metadata file, usually on IPFS, with the image and traits inside it.
• ARC-69 is the cheeky one. Store the metadata in the note field of an asset reconfiguration transaction. The note field is a little scratchpad attached to every transaction, normally used for payment references. Someone realised you could put the entire trait list in there, on chain, for next to nothing, and update it later by sending another configuration transaction. This is how you get NFTs that evolve.
• ARC-19 is the one that made me laugh out loud. Every asset has a "reserve address" field, which is meant to hold an account address. Someone noticed that an account address and an IPFS content identifier are both just a chunk of bytes of a convenient size. So ARC-19 stores the content identifier in the reserve address field, which means you can update where the metadata points by reconfiguring the asset, while keeping the content-addressed integrity of IPFS.

Storing your image pointer in a field designed for something completely different is the kind of thing that would get flagged in a code review at my day job, and rightly so. In a public standards ecosystem it is engineering folk art, and I am here for it.

Projects I have enjoyed

The Algorand NFT scene is smaller and weirder than the big ecosystems, which is precisely why it is fun. It never got fully colonised by people who talk about "floor price" in a serious voice.

The community favourites have always leaned into a kind of cheerful absurdity, and right now the biggest of them is a herd of donkeys. DonkeyDAO is one of the largest collections on the chain today: a set of donkey NFTs, each with its own traits and personality, wrapped in a community that is as much a group chat as it is a DAO. The donkeys are not just pictures, either: holding one is your ticket into the games and earning options DonkeyDAO runs, which is a much better use of a JPEG than sitting in a wallet looking expensive. It even has its own token, $DDAO, and in a move you rarely see in this industry, the project burned 99.95% of its supply.

Around the donkeys, the rest of the stable is just as silly. There are pirates with an actual game attached. There is a collection of deliberately badly drawn characters that turned into one of the friendliest corners of the ecosystem. There is a horse of famously limited intelligence. There are collectible monsters you can battle.

If that sounds unserious, that is because it is, and that is the point. The serious stuff happened alongside it:

• A major European copyright collecting society tokenised the rights of its member artists as millions of NFTs on the chain, one of the largest real-world NFT deployments anybody has actually done.
• The chain was the official blockchain partner for a certain very large international football tournament in 2022, which brought the first NFT purchase to a great many bewildered people.

The unifying thing is that minting costs a fraction of a cent and finalises in seconds. When the floor is that low, you get both the donkeys and the copyright registry, and I would argue you need both to have a real ecosystem.

A short history, for context

1. 2012

   Silvio Micali shares the Turing Award for foundational work in cryptography.

2. 2017

   Algorand is founded to take on the blockchain trilemma with pure proof of stake.

3. 2019

   Mainnet launches. It has not forked since, because it cannot.

4. 2020

   USDC and USDT both arrive natively on the chain.

5. 2021–22

   The copyright society deployment and the football tournament partnership bring real-world NFTs at scale.

6. 2023

   The largest lending protocol on the chain winds down in an orderly way. A reminder that small ecosystems lose things.

7. 2024

   Dynamic round times bring blocks under three seconds. Algorand Python makes smart contracts look like ordinary Python.

8. 2025

   Tether ends USDT support on Algorand, along with several other smaller chains.

Tokens worth knowing about

A tour, grouped roughly by what they are for. Names and tickers only, because I am describing a landscape, not recommending anything in it.

The serious money

• USDC arrived natively on Algorand in 2020. Native means the real thing issued directly on the chain, not a wrapped copy of a token that lives somewhere else. Moving it for a fraction of a cent with instant finality is genuinely one of the better stablecoin experiences anywhere.
• USDT also launched natively in 2020, and is a cautionary tale: Tether stopped minting on Algorand in 2024 and ended support entirely in 2025. Even the biggest names leave smaller chains.
• goBTC and goETH are bridged Bitcoin and Ethereum, letting those assets play inside the Algorand ecosystem, with all the extra trust that any bridge implies.

Real-world things, pretending to be tokens

• MCAU is tokenised gold, where each token corresponds to allocated physical metal.
• PLANETS came from a project that paid people for running air quality sensors, one of the few token designs I have seen with an obvious reason to exist. It had a bumpy road and eventually moved to another chain, which is itself a useful lesson about real-world token economics.
• OPUL came from a project tokenising music royalties and rights.

DeFi plumbing

• TINY is the token of the ecosystem's longest-running automated market maker, the thing that lets you swap one asset for another without an order book.
• PACT belongs to another established exchange protocol.
• Folks Finance is the main lending and borrowing protocol, where you deposit one asset and borrow another against it.
• YLDY was one of the earliest yield and no-loss lottery projects, and a big part of the early culture, even if its original staking app has since closed.

Culture and chaos

• DDAO is the DonkeyDAO community token, the currency of the herd, with 99.95% of its supply burned.
• AKTA is the ecosystem's longtime dog-themed meme token, because every chain gets exactly one of these and it is the law.
• CHOICE is a token built around on-chain voting and governance experiments, which is a slightly more wholesome use of a coin than most.

And ALGO itself, which pays the fees, secures the network through staking, and is the thing you need a little of in your account before anything else works.

The gotchas, because I love it enough to be honest

Every ecosystem has sharp edges. Here are the ones that catch people, including me.

You have to opt in to receive things

This is the big one. On Algorand you cannot receive an asset unless you have first opted into it. Your account has to explicitly say "yes, I am willing to hold this thing" before anyone can send it to you.

Newcomers hate this for about a week and then love it forever. It means nobody can spam your wallet with mystery tokens, which on other chains is both an annoyance and an attack vector, because a surprising number of scams start with a token appearing in your wallet that you did not ask for and should not interact with.

The bouncer at the door knows your guest list, and your guest list is the only guest list.

Opting in costs you a locked deposit

Here is the part nobody explains up front. Every asset you opt into locks 0.1 ALGO of your balance. Not spends, locks. It comes back when you opt out.

The reason is sound. Each asset you hold makes the network store a little more data about your account forever, and the deposit is what stops people from filling the global ledger with junk for free. But it adds up:

It also means a brand new empty wallet cannot receive its first NFT until someone sends it a bit of ALGO first. Every new user hits this. Every single one. Budget for it.

Check the asset ID, not the name

Names on Algorand are not unique. Anyone can mint a token called USDC. Anyone can mint a thousand of them. The only thing that identifies an asset is its numeric asset ID.

So the ticker is a nickname and the asset ID is the passport. Verify the passport. Every reputable wallet, explorer and marketplace shows you the ID and flags verified assets, and you should look at it every time before you trade something unfamiliar.

Read the manager, freeze and clawback addresses

When an asset is created, the creator can optionally set four special addresses: manager, reserve, freeze and clawback. Freeze means somebody can stop you moving your tokens. Clawback means somebody can take them back out of your account without your signature.

These exist for good reasons. A regulated stablecoin issuer needs to be able to freeze assets subject to a court order, and that is a feature, not a bug, in a compliance context. Notice that the real USDC above has both set.

But it also means that before you buy an unfamiliar asset, you should check whether those addresses are set and who controls them. A "decentralised" token where one anonymous address can claw back everyone's holdings is not what it claims to be. This is a thirty-second check on any explorer, and it is the single most useful piece of due diligence in this ecosystem.

Rekeying is a superpower and a footgun

Algorand lets you change the private key that controls an account without changing the account address. Your address stays the same, but the key that authorises spending from it becomes a different one.

This is brilliant. It means you can rotate keys, hand custody to a multi-signature setup, or recover from a partially compromised setup, all while keeping your address and history.

It also means that if anyone ever tricks you into signing a rekey transaction, your account is now theirs, permanently, and it still looks like your account from the outside.

The ecosystem is small, and things do close

This is the honest part. Algorand is not where the noise is. There have been long stretches where the price did nothing while other chains had their moment in the sun, and there have been real casualties. The chain's largest lending protocol wound down entirely in 2023, in an orderly way that let users withdraw, but wound down nonetheless. Tether left. Projects migrate.

Smaller ecosystem means fewer applications, fewer users, thinner liquidity, and a genuine risk that a project you like stops existing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

So why do I stay

Because I have developed a taste for things that are boring in the right way.

My day job has taught me that the most impressive engineering is usually invisible. Nobody throws a parade for a settlement system that has never lost a transaction. The reward for getting the hard, unglamorous parts right is that nothing happens, loudly, for years.

Algorand is that kind of system. The finality is instant because the consensus protocol is built so it cannot fork. The tokens are safe because they are not bespoke code. The fees are predictable because they are fixed and tiny. And the tooling has got steadily better, to the point where a smart contract looks reassuringly like normal Python:

from algopy import ARC4Contract, String, arc4
 
 
class HelloWorld(ARC4Contract):
    @arc4.abimethod
    def hello(self, name: String) -> String:
        return "Hello, " + name

The chain has been running since 2019 and simply has not fallen over.

It is the blockchain equivalent of a very well-made washing machine. It does the thing. It does it every time. It does not want to be your identity.

And then, running on top of all that rigorous cryptographic machinery built by a Turing Award winner, there are thousands of pictures of donkeys.

I find that combination completely delightful, and I am not going to apologise for it.

Personal blog, personal opinions, nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy anything. Blockchain details change fast, so verify anything technical against the current official documentation before you rely on it. And please, check the asset ID.