Overview

Algorand is a proof-of-stake blockchain and cryptocurrency. Algorand's native cryptocurrency is called ALGO.

History

Algorand was founded in 2017 by Silvio Micali, a computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

On March 17, 2026, the SEC and the CFTC jointly issued an interpretive release that identified ALGO as a digital commodity. Previously, the SEC had named ALGO as an unregistered security in several lawsuits against cryptocurrency exchanges.

Design

Algorand can only be forked intentionally through soft forks and source code forks.

Consensus algorithm

Algorand uses a Byzantine agreement protocol that leverages proof of stake, which contributes to its energy efficiency.

The Algorand Foundation funded an article which claims Algorand's overall protocol framework is sound under certain conditions.

Cryptographic sortition

The core principle of Algorand consensus is the cryptographic "self" sortition. The sortition procedure runs locally and privately, on each node of the network participating in the consensus protocol, without a centralized coordination. The goal of the sortition algorithm is randomly selecting a subset of users participating in the consensus protocol (committees) ensuring two properties: the sortition's result can be easily verified once it is published, while it can not be determined ahead of time by malicious adversaries.

The number of selected users in the sortition (committee size) is defined as a statistical expectation on the outcome of a pseudo-random process. The likelihood that a given user will be selected (in the committee) is influenced by the number of ALGO tokens held by that user (the stake).