October 24, Blockchain ProtocolAlgorandPress release
officialPress releaseAccording to the statement, the funds come from a number of international investment groups, covering venture capital, cryptocurrency and financial services industries. In addition, Steve Kokinos, former co-founder of Boston cloud services company Fuze, and w. Sean Ford, former chief marketing officer of software provider LogMeIn, will join Algorand as CEO and chief operating officer, respectively. The infusion of new capital and the addition of new executives will help the blockchain protocol get off the ground.
According to public information, Algorand was proposed by Silvio Micali, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2016, aiming to solve the "impossible triangle" in blockchain projects by providing a decentralized, scalable and secure platform. question. In February 2018, Algorand received $4 million in venture capital from Silicon Valley venture capital Pillar and Union Square Ventures (USV).
In fact, part of the reason why Algorand has received so much attention comes from its founder Silvio Micali. Compared with MIT professor, Micali is more famous as a cryptographer and Turing Award winner. In 1986, he co-created the first A paper on the theory of zero-knowledge proofs. Silvio Micali named his project Algorand, which consists of algorithm (algorithm) + random (random), which means that the biggest feature of alogrand is that it uses algorithms to randomly generate block nodes and verification nodes.
Silvio Micali believes that the current blockchain protocol has problems such as high energy consumption, lack of democracy, easy forks, and poor scalability. In response to the above pain points, Algorand proposed a new consensus algorithm, that is, pure proof of stake (PPOS Pure Proof of Stake) . Different from POW, POS, and DPOS consensus algorithms, PPOS emphasizes decentralization in the true sense (no distinction between ordinary users and "miners" and no user classification), large scalability (the random algorithm has a small amount of calculation, almost no Delay), strong security (can resist the attack of the protocol layer and the attack of the network communication layer)
In Algorand, the consensus mechanism is divided into two steps: 1) Random election of block generators to generate blocks 2) Random selection of 1000 people to verify blocks to form a consensus.
Technically speaking, the cryptographic sortation determines that the "verifier" knows that he is selected in secret, but they can only prove their "verifier" qualifications by publishing the certificate, and it is difficult to judge in advance who will be selected. Elected as "validator". Therefore, the "validator" selection process is difficult to manipulate or predict.
In addition, in the two-step voting mechanism, the execution of the Byzantine agreement is very fast, because each cycle of the Byzantine agreement has 3 sub-steps, and each sub-step of each cycle can be executed by a new, independently randomly selected participant , so as to prevent the collusion of malicious users.
In 2017, the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory conducted simulation tests on Algorand to evaluate its performance on 1,000 EC2 virtual machines, simulating up to 500,000 users. Experimental results show that Algorand can confirm transactions in under a minute, achieve 125 times the throughput of Bitcoin, and hardly scale to more users.
disputedispute, Ethereum founder Vitalik once commented on Algorand: "One of the things I worry about is that if you don't have any incentives at all, it means you have no motivation, you will get lazy, and you may leave the network."
However, in September of this yearlatest speechCounter-intuitive Algorand: breaking through the "impossible triangle", Utopia or Utopia?
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Counter-intuitive Algorand: breaking through the "impossible triangle", Utopia or Utopia?
