A Comprehensive Understanding of the Current Development Status and Major Projects of the Algorand Ecosystem

Source: 98KDAO

In the just-concluded year of 2021, the competition among major new public chains entered a heated stage, with BSC initially taking the lead, followed by fierce competition among Solana, AVAX, and FTM. Meanwhile, Algorand, as an important member of the new public chains, has also made significant progress.

Algorand is a blockchain protocol project funded and developed by Turing Award winner and MIT professor Silvio Micali, dedicated to creating a platform that achieves decentralization, scalability, and security.

Ecosystem Overview

On April 30, 2020, the Algorand Foundation officially launched the "250 Million ALGO Ecosystem Reward Program," which has successfully awarded nearly 200 projects so far, and the program will continue to operate for many years. After two years of development, the Algorand ecosystem has become increasingly complete, covering 27 sub-sectors including DEX, lending, cross-chain, wallets, and NFT trading, as shown in the figure below:

Key Projects in the ALGO Ecosystem

1. DEX

Yieldly

Cross-chain Swap + liquidity staking mining, with investments from Longhash, Lede, NGC, and others. YDLY has been launched on MEXC. It also has layouts in the NFT and Gaming fields. The featured product is Algo's no-loss lottery.

Official website: https://yieldly.finance/

Tinyman

Nicknamed "Little Yellow Man," it provides AMM liquidity mining. It was attacked by hackers in early January but was relaunched on the mainnet after compensating users and upgrading technology.

Official website: https://tinyman.org/

Algodex

A decentralized exchange, a competitor to Tinyman, developed by Algodev and later acquired by Algonaut Capital, with the mainnet now live.

Official website: https://about.algodex.com/

2. Lending

AlgoFi

Invested and incubated by YC, launched on the mainnet on February 22 this year. Currently collaborating with the Algorand Foundation for liquidity incentives, providing additional incentives for lending users.

Official website: https://www.algofi.org/

Folks Finance

A lending project, invested by Jump, Coinbase, OKX, etc., with the testnet already launched.

Official website: https://folks.finance/

3. Cross-Chain

Algomint

An asset cross-chain bridge that bridges BTC, ETH, and mainstream stablecoins to the Algorand chain, and has also joined the foundation's liquidity incentive program. The governance token will be launched soon.

Official website: https://algomint.io/

C3 Protocol

A one-stop market for cross-chain staking, spot, derivatives, and cross-margin, reconstructing the entire financial stack on a single layer, with strong technology.

Official website: https://c3.io/

4. Wallet

Pera Wallet

The original Algorand Wallet, a mainstream mobile wallet in the ecosystem, plans to support NFT display, Algorand governance reminders, and other features this year.

Official website: https://perawallet.app/

MyAlgo Wallet

Another mainstream mobile wallet.

Official website: https://wallet.myalgo.com/

5. NFT Trading Platforms

AB2 Gallery/Rand Gallery

Currently, the NFT market platforms with the highest trading volume in the Algorand ecosystem, most popular Algorand NFTs are traded on these two platforms.

AB2 Gallery official website: https://ab2.gallery/

Rand Gallery official website: https://www.randgallery.com/algo-collection/

Aorist

An NFT trading platform focused on artworks, featuring works from well-known visual artists and a specific fan base, with virtually no PFP and meme NFTs.

Official website: https://aorist.art/

6. NFT Music

Opulous

A music copyright NFT project, launched last year on Huobi, with a hundredfold increase, in collaboration with LINE.

Official website: https://opulous.org/

7. NFT PFP

Al Goanna

The most popular PFP project on Algo, with the main character being a lizard, also the NFT design for tickets to the Algo official conference.

Official website: https://algoanna.com/

8. Games

Zone by XTZ

A community-oriented GameFi project, featuring classic elements like P2E, PVP, and NFT, uniquely developed the Discord GameFi bot Zobo, and has its own esports platform XTZesport.

Official website: https://zone.game/

9. Oracles

Algoracle

The first project to receive the Algorand Oracle Super Grant.

Official website: https://www.algoracle.ai/

10. DAO

AlgoDAO

Strategic investment by the Algorand Foundation, a launchpad with its own project accelerator, currently allowing projects through DD to receive platform incentives. The featured product is called Sigma Farm. Expected to launch the testnet soon.

Official website: https://algodao.fi/

11. Domain Names

ANS

A project born from Encode, with the mainnet now live, allowing registration of .algo domain names, with prices varying by length. The rental fee after registration is calculated annually.

Official website: https://algonameservice.com/home

12. Environmental Protection

Planet Watch

A project that incentivizes nodes to collect global air quality data through distributed air quality sensors, in cooperation with the city of Miami.

Official website: https://www.planetwatch.io/

Climatetrade

An on-chain carbon emission trading market, providing carbon footprint data oracles and carbon neutrality offset mechanisms for products.

Official website: https://climatetrade.com/

Most Anticipated Developments in 2022

1. State Proof Consensus

State Proof is an important upgrade to Algorand's mainnet consensus, which will provide quantum-level security and multi-chain "bridge" interoperability. This significant upgrade has already been updated on the testnet and is expected to go live on the mainnet in the first half of the year. This consensus update will not only make Algorand more secure but also provide native cross-chain interoperability.

2. EVM Compatibility

Algorand has allocated $20 million to fund solutions and infrastructure for EVM compatibility, with the expectation that this year will see the AVM (Algorand's self-developed virtual machine) become compatible with EVM. Achieving EVM compatibility will mean that active users, projects, and developers from the ETH ecosystem can easily enter the Algorand ecosystem, leading to an explosive growth in the ecosystem.

3. DeFi

The DeFi ecosystem on Algorand is expected to grow rapidly with the prospect of EVM compatibility and the support of multiple liquidity incentive funds. Last year, Algorand integrated several foundational DeFi projects, laying a solid foundation in areas such as AMM, Swap, lending, and liquidity mining, with these projects having top-tier investment backing, and surprises are expected in APY and TVL.

4. Carbon Finance

In the context of international policies on carbon reduction, Algorand has become the first purely green blockchain with negative carbon emissions since last year, closely aligning with international finance and policy directions, and has been laying the groundwork for environmental finance projects in cooperation with governments, such as carbon credit markets, air quality monitoring mining, and carbon emission oracles. Carbon finance is likely to be a new hotspot this year.

About ALGO Grants

Algorand is working with the community to build a trusted, public, and permissionless infrastructure for a borderless economy. To achieve this mission, the Algorand Foundation has launched a $250 million ALGO Grants Program. This is a long-term ecological construction plan that aims to provide various funding levels for application development, tools and infrastructure, research, and education and community initiatives. These will enhance the capacity for innovation and development, supporting the growth of a vibrant, diverse, and prosperous ALGO ecosystem.

Four Major Investment Directions

1. Industry Research

ALGO Grants support research in a wide range of fields related to blockchain, cryptocurrency, token economics, distributed systems, and other disciplines such as computer science, cryptography, programming languages, and artificial intelligence.

2. Infrastructure and Development Tools

ALGO Grants will invest in infrastructure projects to support the development of the Algorand blockchain. This will form the foundation for network and ecosystem growth, enabling developers and system builders to easily access the Algorand network.

Initial priorities include applications, utilities, monitoring, tools, and deployment development areas, but we are open to other innovative areas around the Algorand blockchain. Key areas include but are not limited to user tools, IDE integration for ASC, asset creation and operation, TEAL compilation, TEAL analysis, and formal proofs.

3. Applications

ALGO Grants invest in various projects aimed at connecting the real world with virtual currencies and leveraging the immense potential of a borderless economy. The Algorand blockchain is scalable, efficient, final, and securely programmable. These technical capabilities make Algorand a natural network for developing real business applications that can deliver value creation, mass adoption, and disruptive economic and business innovations.

At the same time, ALGO Grants are open to other applications and innovative use cases: DeFi or open finance, payments, asset exchanges, social media, supply chains, copyright certification, asset tokenization, and global information systems.

4. Community

The Algorand Foundation values community participation and currently supports community advocates in local activities primarily through the Algorand Ambassador Grant Program. To promote the growth of a diverse and vibrant Algorand community globally, the foundation will also consider supporting community-led initiatives and will later launch a community-based open grant program, allowing a broader community to vote on which projects should receive grants.