Algorand (ALGO) Blockchain Triggers Major Upgrade: What We Know

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Algorand (ALGO), a veteran blockchain project, announces the activation of a critical networking software upgrade. It enables the blockchain to process transactions faster and provides Algorand-focused developers with some brand new tools.

Advanced tooling, speed, unparalleled performance: Algorand’s upgrade highlights

Yesterday, June 22, 2023, the proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain Algorand (ALGO) team announced the activation of a major technical upgrade.

• The latest Algorand (ALGO) blockchain upgrade (technical release name go-algorand 3.16) aims to improve the performance, finality time and developer-friendliness of the blockchain.
• For the first time ever, Algorand (ALGO) has managed to reduce block latency to 3.3 seconds and reach instant block finality.
• In total, this means an improvement of more than 10% in network performance without compromising decentralization and security.
• The new upgrade also introduced a number of new development tools for engineering, testing and research.
• The community appreciates Algorand’s progress; his ALGO token is up 30% in the last two weeks.

Potentially, the new upgrade could be a game changer for the entire ecosystem of decentralized applications (dApps) that use Algorand (ALGO) as a technical foundation.

What is Algorand (ALGO)?

Introduced in 2017 by MIT professor Silvio Micali, Algorand (ALGO) is a programmable proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain. It means that it acts as a platform for smart contracts and is therefore capable of hosting various types of decentralized applications (dApps).

The advancement of Algorand (ALGO) is supported by Algorand Foundation Ltd., a Singapore-based non-profit organization, and Algorand Corporation, a for-profit entity registered in Boston, U.S.A. Besides Silvio Micali, CPO Paul Riegle and CFO Matthew Commons are known as key figureheads of the Algorand (ALGO) project.

Algorand (ALGO) launched its first public testnet iteration in April 2019. In June 2019, the blockchain’s mainnet operations began.

According to DappRadar statistics, Algorand (ALGO) is a tech platform for 31 decentralized applications: DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, on-chain games, gambling protocols, Web3 social media and so on. The codebase of the platform is written in TEAL, Reach, Java, PyTeal, Python, Go, Rust i.e. most popular programming languages.

What makes Algorand (ALGO) special?

Thanks to its well-balanced and proven technical design, Algorand (ALGO) is popular among developers from different regions around the world. Algorand (ALGO) is one of the rare blockchains that has integrated both of the largest stablecoins by market cap, US Dollar Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC).

Also, Algorand (ALGO) is a participant and partner of many central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiatives proposed by different countries.

 

Italy and Australia have hosted their CBDC experiments on the Algorand (ALGO) blockchain.

As previously mentioned by U.Today, Algorand (ALGO) is the first blockchain to become fully carbon neutral, offsetting all carbon emissions.

What is ALGO?

Algorand’s cryptocurrency ALGO is a core proprietary utility and governance tool of the platform. The maximum supply is limited to 10,000,000,000 coins, while 7,635,716,196 ALGO have already been put into circulation.

In terms of protocol design, ALGO tokens are used to reward stakers for their contribution to network stability and integrity.

With a market cap of $960 million, Algorand’s ALGO is the 44th largest cryptocurrency by net market capitalization. It is available on all major centralized exchanges as well as Algorand’s own DEX’s Tinyman and 4swap.

Algorand (ALGO) upgrade: comprehensive guide

The recently activated upgrade (go-algorand 3.16) marks an important milestone in Algorand’s progress to solve the blockchain trilemma in a new way.

Algorand (ALGO) upgrade: Basic

According to an official announcement shared by representatives of the Algorand Foundation on social media channels and the developer portal, the major technology upgrade on Algorand was activated on June 22, 2023.

The upgrade reduced block end time for end users by more than 10%: this metric reached 3.3 seconds for the first time in blockchain history.

The blockchain ecosystem also gained new developer tools: Simulate, a powerful smart contract simulator, and Conduit, a tool for flexible and easy access to data.

Paul Riegle, chief product officer at Algorand, emphasized the importance of the new developer tools for all Web3 engineers:

We are hyper-focused on Algorand, providing the best technology for developers to interact with and end users to experience. These new capabilities enable builders to bring higher-quality dApps to market faster through tailored datasets and faster and more efficient testing

Finally, developers received a suite of powerful technical tools, including group resource sharing for application calls, devmode timestamp checking for testing dApps, and new Algod endpoints for transaction group status updates.

Algorand (ALGO) upgrade: speed and block finality

The block finish time reduction was the backbone element of the aforementioned upgrade. Simply put, it makes transactions faster for end users. This, in turn, results in a better user experience and makes Algorand-based dApps more attractive to Web3-oriented customers.

To achieve this goal, the developers of Algorand (ALGO) used a number of technical advantages, including opportunistic proposal message compression, an elastic rate limiter and congestion manager to effectively address network congestion caused by noisy peers, and a network identity challenge to prevent duplicate peer connections.

As a result, the new blockchain software guarantees optimized disk, CPU and node memory usage to reduce the time it takes to add transactions to the blockchain.

Algorand (ALGO) upgrade: tools

In addition to transaction logic optimizations, the Algorand team has included a number of developer-focused improvements in the upgrade. For example, developers can now manage the block timestamp in devmode.

The launch of Simulate, an advanced transaction simulator, comes with two major improvements. Developers can now work with a larger amount of logging allowed for smart contracts and a larger opcode budget allowed for smart contracts.

In addition, Algorand’s node software, Algod, will be able to send data back to the ledger as a result of individual transaction groups. All of these advancements are poised to make Algorand (ALGO) more developer-friendly as competition in the programmable blockchain segment accelerates.

Algorand (ALGO) upgrade: how can I benefit from it?

The new upgrade to the Algorand (ALGO) blockchain unlocks several opportunities for traders, developers and entrepreneurs to leverage ALGO resources.

1. For traders. The successful release of the go-algorand 3.16 upgrade excited the Algorand (ALGO) community, increasing interest in the ALGO token. In the past 14 days, the price has risen from $0.1 to more than $0.132, a growth of more than 30%.
2. For developers. Since Algorand (ALGO) now has more developer-friendly engineering and testing resources, working with the codebase becomes easier. It can be chosen by budding developers as a way to try out the disruptive power of the blockchain.
3. For dApps users. With increased block verification time and near-zero latency, all applications on the Algorand (ALGO) blockchain now run faster than ever.
4. For companies and projects. As Algorand (ALGO) becomes more competitive in terms of usability, performance, and developer experience, more and more products will choose it as the platform for blockchain transformation.

Contributors to Algorand’s new upgrade (ALGO) emphasized that it is designed to commemorate the fourth anniversary of their product’s mainnet operations.

To block

The Algorand (ALGO) upgrade go-algorand 3.16 was activated in the mainnet on June 22, 2023. It reduced the block end time for end users by more than 10% to 3.3 seconds. It also introduced a suite of new developer tools designed to ease the engineering and testing processes on Algorand (ALGO).